EU countries reinstate border controls

Hungary has effectively sealed its border with Serbia to stem the massive influx of refugees as Germany slammed the "disgraceful" refusal of other EU countries to accept more migrants after 22 died in yet another shipwreck.

Budapest's move on Tuesday came after Austria and Slovakian authorities followed Germany's lead in reimposing border controls, a further body blow to Europe's cherished passport-free Schengen zone as the EU's border agency said more than half a million migrants had been counted at the bloc's borders so far this year.

With no sign of a let-up in the flow of refugees, German Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel said that Europe had "disgraced itself" after EU ministers failed to agree on Monday how to share the burden.

Hungarian police closed a 40-metre gap in a razor-wire barrier for train tracks that had until Monday night been the main illegal crossing point and pushed migrants on towards a nearby official crossing point.

But on Tuesday morning, that official crossing at Roszke, and a second one at Asothalom, were also shut, leaving several hundred people stuck on the Serbian side with no apparent hope of entering the EU member state.

Around 20 Hungarian riot police stood behind a two-metre fence at Roszke while on the Serbian side of the barbed wire, 300 migrants waited around 50 tents for the border to reopen.

"Why are they doing this?" one Afghan woman holding a child asked a volunteer, who was only able to give her a bottle of water. Several groups of people were seen walking along the border fence searching in vain for another way into Hungary.

Bashir, a 17-year-old schoolboy from Bazari in Afghanistan wanting to make it to Sweden or Norway, said he arrived at the border an hour after it closed at midnight and was unable to cross.

"It was really bad last night. It was cold, particularly for families with little babies," he told AFP.

The closure came as harsh new Hungarian laws came into effect criminalising "illegal border-crossing" with up to three years in prison. Authorities on Tuesday announced the first arrests had been made under the new legislation.

Hungary, which has about 200,000 migrants enter the country this year, is also building a controversial four-metre high fence along the 175-kilometre border with non-EU Serbia.

With Poland and the Netherlands saying they were also considering border controls, there are fears the very ideal of a borderless Europe allowing passport-free travel to hundreds of millions of citizens could collapse, even though states are permitted to impose temporary controls for security reasons.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel's spokesman insisted on Monday that the country was not closing its doors to refugees, but argued the new measures were needed to restore order to the asylum process.

The move caused long traffic jams on the border from Austria into the southern German state of Bavaria and major disruption to rail services.

Around 2000 asylum-seekers still crossed the frontier into Germany on Monday, albeit at a slower pace than in recent weeks, federal police spokesman Rainer Scharf said in the southern German town of Freilassing.

Vice Chancellor Gabriel said that Europe had "disgraced itself" after EU ministers failed in Monday's emergency meeting to reach unanimous agreement on a plan to share out 120,000 refugees.

This was aimed at easing the burden on frontline states Hungary, Greece and Italy from the tide of people fleeing war zones such as Syria and Afghanistan, but several members of the bloc, notably eastern members including Hungary, object.

Berlin on Tuesday suggested that EU aid could be cut to member states that refuse to take their share of migrants, a proposal denied by the European Commission.

But the crisis is moving faster than the 28-nation EU can handle, with the EU's Frontex border agency saying on Tuesday that more than half a million migrants crossed the bloc's borders in the year to August 31, almost double the total for the whole of 2014.

In another tragedy that underscored the dangers faced by migrants, at least 22 people including at least four children and 11 women were feared drowned when the wooden boat taking them from Turkey to Greece sank. Another 211 were rescued.