The EU may resettle a few thousand refugees from the Egyptian and Tunisian borders with Libya who have been made homeless by the uprising.

Representatives of member states will be meeting in Brussels today to discuss the possibility of resettling about 250 sub-Saharans from the Egyptian border and “some thousands” from the Tunisian border.

Returning from a trip to Egypt yesterday, Home Affairs Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom said: “We are talking about few numbers of mainly Eritreans, Sudanese and Ethiopians, who fled the conflict in Libya and cannot return to their countries for obvious reasons.

“A number of member states have already shown interest to resettle these people who suddenly found themselves without anywhere to live and we are working on the details,” she said.

Ms Malmstrom refused to name any member states saying she preferred to give more information at the end of discussions.

“As you know, we cannot impose quotas on member states and we depend completely on their generosity.

“However, I urge member states to show their concrete solidarity in this case,” she appealed.

She said this was not the first time the EU executive was taking such an initiative and she cited the example of Malta’s pilot project, through which about 290 refugees were resettled in other member states.

So far though, member states have generally been wary of such resettlement initiatives. Set up in 2008, the first intra-EU resettlement programme, specifically designed for Malta, attracted little interest and apart from France, participating member states only took token numbers. The majority of member states refused to take part.

Meanwhile, the US took more refugees from Malta than the total taken by other EU states.

Until a few weeks ago, many member states were also still resisting the idea of sharing the burden with Italy and Malta in case of a massive influx of asylum seekers from the Libyan crisis.

According to Humanitarian Aid Commissioner Kristalina Georgieva, the situation has now changed, with only the UK and Denmark still against resettling any refugees.