There were no tears but a lot of bleary eyes in the early hours of Friday as EU leaders were locked in an internecine battle over migrant quotas.

Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi arrives at the European Union summit in Brussels on Thursday. Photo: Reuters

It was never going to be easy to coax all of the countries to agree to a proposal to redistribute 40,000 asylum seekers from Italy and Greece. The emergency measure was proposed by the European Commission to alleviate the pressure on the two Mediterranean countries.

But while Prime Minister Joseph Muscat hailed the council conclusions as “a major breakthrough” they were far less dramatic than what the European Commission had proposed. Opposition leader Simon Busuttil described the conclusions as a “half-baked deal” though the rest of the conclusions do include measures such as the creation of reception facilities in frontline States with the support of various EU agencies.

Under the original plan the Commission outlined a distribution key giving the exact number of migrants and every member state was expected to take in from Italy and Greece over the next two years. The focus was on Syrian and Eritrean asylum seekers.

The Council failed to agree on this and while the end-of-summit declaration did agree on “the temporary and exceptional” relocation of 40,000 migrants from Italy and Greece, it postponed the details to July. However, the biggest change was probably the removal of the Commission’s insistence that redistribution should have been mandatory.

The final wording in the declaration makes no reference to the distribution key proposed by the Commission and leaves it up to the individual member states to seek some form of “consensus.

The mechanism on how this will be achieved will have to be agreed by the end of July, undermining the urgency with which the Commission had acted in the aftermath of a tragedy that saw more than 800 migrants drown when their boat capsized last April.

The bar has been low from the beginning, and even at that low level, the only agreement was for relocations on a voluntary basis, which I think is disappointing

But the Commission had also proposed the resettlement of another 20,000 migrants across the EU from third countries on the basis of a distribution key similar to the emergency mechanism.

The Council conclusions left it up to individual member states to determine their participation in this scheme through “multilateral and national schemes” and so diluting the strength of the original proposal. The conclusions left a bitter taste among human rights organisations already critical of the relatively small number of migrants the EU was prepared to relocate and resettle.

Peter Sutherland, the UN secretary general’s special representative on international migration, was scathing in his evaluation of the agreement. “The bar has been placed at a low level for the beginning, and even at that low level, the only agreement was for relocations on a voluntary basis, which I think is disappointing,” Mr Sutherland told reporters on Friday.

The watered down deal on handling the migration crisis through solidarity between member states, however, came in stark contrast with the unanimous agreement on an EU military operation in the Mediterranean to attack migrant smuggler networks.

But the apparent disconnect between the willingness to take quick decisive measures to tackle migration out at sea and the reluctance to redistribute saved migrants is possibly a reflection of the anti-immigrant mood across Europe that champions a hard-line approach.

The rise of anti-immigrant parties has conditioned many EU leaders and this was evident in the words of European Council president Donald Tusk.

He admitted some member states were scared of the consequences back home. Whether the fear will subside in a month’s time when the details for relocating migrants should be hammered out, is another matter altogether.