Stockholm  - The question of how to deal with the influx of illegal migrants entering the European Union across the Mediterranean took centre stage Thursday as EU interior ministers met in Stockholm.

"Two issues are the most important: one is the creation of a common European asylum system, which would mean that we would have increased solidarity between member states and more shared responsibility," Sweden's migration minister Tobias Billstrom, who chaired the informal meeting, said.

"The second thing is the question of legal migration: we need to open more ways for people to come to Europe and work here," he said.

Thousands of would-be migrants from Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia risk their lives every year trying to reach EU shores in search of a better life.

In recent years, the flood has threatened to overwhelm national reception services in EU members Cyprus, Greece, Italy and Malta. Those four countries have repeatedly demanded that other EU member states take some of the migrants off their hands.

The issue of "burden-sharing" should be one of the top priorities in the EU's new five-year plan on justice issues, which ministers were set to discuss informally on Thursday, Italy's interior minister, Roberto Maroni, said as he arrived in Stockholm.

In June, EU leaders for the first time called for solidarity with the four most-affected member states, but stressed that any such measures should be voluntary.

The EU's executive, the European Commission, is now set to propose a pilot project aimed at taking migrants from Malta into other EU member states.

Cyprus' interior minister, Neoklis Sylikiotis, welcomed that idea, but warned that the insistence on voluntary support would not be enough in the long term.

But member states outside the affected zone said that the EU should focus on improving cooperation with the countries from which the migrants come, so that fewer will want to come to Europe and it will be easier to repatriate those whose claims are rejected.(dpa)