Luxembourg Foreign Minister Calls For EU-Wide Refugee Authority

RTX1IVG9 — Luxembourg's Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn has called for a European Union-wide office on refugee issues. Pictured: Asselborn attends a meeting with Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Moscow, July 3, 2015. Reuters/Sergei Karpukhin

BERLIN (Reuters) - Luxembourg Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn called for the creation of an EU-wide refugee authority, saying the same standards needed to be used to deal with asylum applications across the region.

Asselborn, Luxembourg's minister in charge of migration, suggested expanding the European Asylum Support Office, an EU agency based in Malta, into a European refugee authority, in an interview due to be published in the German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung on Thursday.

He said such an agency was necessary because at the moment there are "incredible discrepancies in the time taken to process applications and in acceptance rates".

Luxembourg currently holds the rotating EU presidency.

(Reporting by Michelle Martin, editing by Larry King)

European union