Germany's Scholz justifies controversial EU asylum deal

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Saturday defended a deal worked out this week calling for EU member states to tighten the right to asylum.
Countries must stop pointing fingers at others and not feeling responsible, Scholz said in remarks at the 38th German Protestant Church Congress in the southern city of Nuremberg.
"That's why the agreement is that we establish a solidarity mechanism," he told a capacity crowd at the city's convention centre.
"Finally, finally" a system of solidarity for the distribution of refugees in Europe must be established, Scholz asserted.
Scholz promised faster asylum procedures and more digitization of the processes.
But countries needed to be able to deal with sending someone back who is not allowed to stay in Europe, he added.
EU interior ministers reached an agreement to tighten rules on Thursday, in the face of rising migration figures.
The deal entails the processing of asylum seekers in reception facilities at the bloc's external borders.
If an applicant has no chance of obtaining asylum in the EU, he or she would be sent back immediately.
The deal has come in for criticism from rights groups, who say it will have disastrous consequences for people in need of protection.
Some EU states, like Poland and Hungary, have meanwhile denounced it as an abuse to power and object to any mandatory distribution of asylum seekers across the bloc.