GERMAN Chancellor Angela Merkel called again yesterday for a joint EU response to the thousands of refugees seeking safety in Europe.

EU chiefs have grudgingly accepted the need for emergency talks but have scheduled them for September 14, two weeks away when hundreds of people are dying weekly in the desperate search for a safe haven from the terrorism and civil wars raging in Iraq, Syria, Libya, South Sudan and other countries.

Germany has so far accepted more asylum-seekers than any other EU country, though this is still far fewer refugees than Turkey, Lebanon or Jordan is hosting.

Ms Merkel implied that Europe could “fail on the question of refugees,” putting its claimed respect for “universal civil rights” at risk.

She slapped down a proposal from Slovakia to give preferential treatment to Christian refugees and voiced irritation at resistance among other EU countries — including Britain — to accept resettlement quotas, saying: “There’s no point in publicly calling each other names, but we must say that the current situation is not satisfactory.”

Even so, member states are increasingly at each other’s throats.

Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto snarled yesterday that comments from his French counterpart Laurent Fabius were “shocking and groundless.”

Mr Fabius had accused Hungary of betraying “the common values of Europe” by building a razor-wire fence to keep out refugees.

France is pressing alongside Britain and Germany for new “hot spot” centres based in the EU’s main entry points — Italy and Greece — which will supposedly fast-track asylum applications, though it is unclear how fair such sped-up processes will be.

The Greek coastguard said yesterday it had picked up almost 2,500 people stranded at sea over the last weekend alone, including many fished out of the water itself, some unconscious.

And massive tailbacks built up on the Budapest-Vienna motorway after Austria began inspecting lorries at the formerly open border.

The shocking discovery of 71 men, women and children, believed to be Syrian, who suffocated in the back of a lorry abandoned on that road has prompted the new checks.