The leaders of four Central European countries vowed on Tuesday not to be blackmailed by threats by European Union (EU) on migration.
The leaders vowed not to be threatened with financial punishment from Brussels if they don’t join in the relocation of thousands of Middle Eastern and African refugees.
A number of politicians in the western EU had also spoken in favour of the bloc’s plans to take actions against countries that do not want to accept refugees, including having their EU funding cut.
Austria also said it would seek an exemption from having to accept more asylum-seekers, arguing that it had already taken in its fair share during Europe’s migration crisis.
The prime ministers of the Visegrad Group (V4) Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and the Czech Republic said that they had a sovereign right to decide how to deal with the migrants that had flooded the continent mainly from the war in Syria.
The EU’s top migration official warned member states last week against failing to host refugees to help alleviate the pressure on countries like Greece and Italy, which had borne the brunt of arrivals across the Mediterranean.
“Poland and the Visegrad Group will never agree to this blackmail or to such conditions to be dictated,’’ Polish Prime Minister Beata Szydlo told reporters after the V4 meeting.
Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico also said it was “blackmail’’ to tie the issue of EU funding to migration policy.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who had called mass migration a “Trojan horse for terrorism’’ also defended his new policy to detain migrants at the border.
No fewer than 14,500 asylum-seekers had been relocated from Greece and Italy under the two-year EU plan that was supposed to cover 160,000 people and which expires in September.
Some 1.6 million refugees and migrants reached the European Union between 2014 and 2016 and how to handle them has been a major point of contention between member states.
“The current migration policy has failed the exam,’’ Szydlo said. (Reuters/NAN)
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