Poland wants EU migrant procedures dropped

Last month, the commission decided to launch procedures against Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary for failing to take in migrants from camps in southern Europe, which Brussels said was against EU laws.

The countries were given a month to respond.

Poland’s interior ministry has said there are “systemic deficiencies in the … relocation mechanism, which makes it impossible to guarantee security”.

Interior Minister Mariusz Błaszczak, who signed the letter to Brussels, said: “It is a mechanism… which brings new waves of migrants”.

“My reasoning is security,” he added. “Security is [a matter of] national policy and not of community policy”.

The interior ministry said that Poland does not reject the EU’s principle of solidarity, but that it was concerned about insufficient security checks on migrants and said aid should be sent to their countries of origin.

It added that separating economically motivated migrants from asylum seekers and fighting people-smuggling were other issues that needed to be addressed.

In September 2015, EU leaders agreed that each country would accept a number of migrants over two years to alleviate the pressure on Greece and Italy, which have seen the arrival of tens of thousands of people from the Middle East and Africa.

EU leaders, including Poland's previous government, agreed to relocate a total of about 100,000 migrants of more than two million people who arrived in Europe since 2015.

But since coming to power in October 2015, Poland's conservative Law and Justice (PiS) government has staunchly opposed the arrangement.

Only 14,000 migrants from refugee camps in countries along the Mediterranean coast have been relocated to EU countries. (vb/pk)

Source: PAP