GERMANY and Sweden renewed calls for a Europe-wide refugee quota system yesterday, even as Hungary vowed to speed up construction of a border fence to keep migrants out.

“We need binding quotas for refugees who have the right to asylum so they are fairly distributed according to strict principles among the member states,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel said after meeting Sweden’s Prime Minister Stefan Lofven.

European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker is expected to put forward a proposal for a quota system today, which Ms Merkel said would be a first step, though a final agreement was probably still far off.

“This is a challenge that will decide the future of Europe, whether we are accepted as a continent of values and individual freedom,” she said. “In this question, where the whole world is looking to us, we can’t simply say Syria is too far away, we’re not going to deal with the problem.”

Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann said countries opposed to the quota system should suffer financial penalties.

He insisted that it was “unacceptable that some nations, because they are not personally affected, refuse to work on a joint solution.” Slovakia, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland all oppose the proposed quotas.

Poland has accepted just 2,000 refugees this year, while Germany says it expects to welcome 800,000.

Polish Defence Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Tomasz Siemoniak defended his country’s position yesterday, calling the existing EU plan a “road to nowhere.”

Hungarian PM Viktor Orban, meanwhile, vowed to deploy more workers to finish the controversial fence along the border with Serbia.

In the capital Budapest, hundreds of desperate refugees queued at Keleti station to board trains to Austria and Germany, not wishing to remain in Hungary where the government is so unwelcoming.

In many cases they were forced into segregated carriages away from other passengers.

But Venezuela’s President Nicola Maduro said on Monday that his country would take in 20,000 Syrian refugees, as many as Britain has pledged to take over the next five years.

Mr Maduro took the opportunity to condemn Western powers’ plans to topple the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, instead calling for the implementation of a peace plan.

Venezuela has welcomed more than 200,000 refugees, mostly from Colombia, in the last five years.