The government in Warsaw expressed on Thursday Poland’s “firm and systematic opposition” to a Brussels plan to resettle between 30,000 and 120,000 migrants in the EU states, reports the EFE agency.
The Polish Minister for European Affairs, Szymon Szynkowski, qualified as “harmful and ineffective the mechanisms of mandatory resettlement of migrants” proposed by the European Commission. “We firmly oppose any attempt to return to this project” of mandatory refugee quotas, the Polish official stated, quoted by Agerpres.
On the other hand, he recalled that since the war in Ukraine started, Poland has received more than one million Ukrainian refugees, for which the Polish state has to bear most of the costs, the European aid of 200 euros for each Ukrainian refugee being insufficient.
For his part, parliamentarian Andrzej Kryj, a member of the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party, said on Polish public radio that “the payment of 22,000 euros for each migrant that Poland refuses to receive is an error of the part of the bureaucrats and a disproportionate figure”, referring to the proposal of the European Commission that the EU states that refuse to receive some migrants through relocations should instead come with other contributions, especially financial ones.
The Polish parliamentarian also mentioned the wave of non-EU migrants who tried to enter the EU through Poland from Belarus, a wave orchestrated by Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko following the European sanctions imposed on his country. “History proves us right, we are the ones who, defending the border with Belarus, guarantee the internal security of Europe”, emphasized the mentioned parliamentarian, who drew attention that “in Poland we do not have situations like those on the streets of German or French cities”.
Brussels has drawn up a road map and committed to finalize the European Pact for Migration and Asylum by the end of the current European legislature, so by the first semester of next year. Since the European Commission presented this pact proposal, in September 2020, progress in negotiations has been slow and disagreements persist over the most conflicting elements.
The European Commission’s proposal revises the principle in the “Dublin Regulations” according to which the first EU country where a non-EU migrant arrives is responsible for settling the asylum request. This Commission proposal does not explicitly provide for mandatory quotas of refugees as in 2016, but it establishes a mechanism of ‘mandatory solidarity’ through which the European Commission can actually set quotas for EU member states, and these countries would have as an alternative instead of relocations other contributions, such as providing financial, material or human support to countries under pressure.
