Migration, refugee crisis need European-level response, Tsipras tells Parliament

"What I told them [at the European Summit] was that Greece is experiencing a major crisis within the crisis," Tsipras said, referring to the waves of refugees arriving daily on the islands of the Aegean.

He noted that the government, from the first minute, had recognised that an effective asylum and first reception system for those needed international and other types of protection was a top priority. In spite of this, he said, the issue now went beyond fixing the system's chronic weaknesses. Greece was faced by an emergency situation, a flood of refugees that "exceeds us," he pointed out, and which had led to recent shocking events like the drowning of hundreds of people in the Mediterranean.

"For us in Greece, this shock is a daily reality," he added.

Tsipras said that the numbers arriving in the country illegally had risen sharply, with new arrivals now at 96,550, of which more than 80 pct were refugees fleeing conflict or persecution, chiefly in Syria. He accused the previous government of failing to make preparations to deal with the problem, even though the rising trend had become apparent in 2014, though not to the same extent.

Among others, he pointed out, it had failed to promptly apply for financing of asylum and migration structures from the relevant European fund, missing the October 2014 deadline, "so that we were left with a financing gap for all the services supplied to the refugee population."

Even if everything had been done on time, Tsipras said, it would still not have been enough "because the migrant and refugee issue cannot be addressed with effective terms of solidarity and respect for human dignity unless it is dealt with by the European Union and the international community as a whole."

He said the government had fought a battle at successive EU summits, along with Italy's Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, to activate this EU solidarity and a sharing of the burden between the member states.

"Our proposals and positions were recorded in the most official way, with the assistance of the European Commissioner," Tsipras said, noting that Greece as well as Italy were now expressly referred to in the Commission's 10-point plan for migration.