Some leaders pointed out that Warsaw and Budapest appeared to be fighting a battle that began years ago, when more than a million people, mostly Syrian refugees, arrived in Europe in 2015, sparking one of the worst crises in the bloc’s history. Others argued that they should not be allowed to break Community rules.
“My feeling was that there is a lot of rancor over the 2015 migration debates,” Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas told reporters at EU headquarters in Brussels. “If you just say no to everything and everyone else tries to reach an agreement, it doesn’t work.”
Slovenian Prime Minister Robert Golob noted that “Hungary was totally adamant” to remove the issue from the final communiqué of the bloc’s leaders’ summit. “It wasn’t about doing it one way or the other. It was something like ‘we don’t want migration mentioned at all’”.
Golob confirmed that the president of the European Council, Charles Michel, who chairs the summit, could issue an independent statement that does not require the unanimous support of the 27.
Earlier this month, the bloc’s countries made progress on asylum law reform by agreeing on a plan to share responsibility for migrants who enter Europe without authorization. This issue is at the root of one of the institution’s longest-running political crises.
The agreement compensates the obligation of the countries where more arrivals of migrants are registered to receive and house them, with the requirement that other members provide them with support, either financially or by hosting refugees. Countries that refuse to receive migrants could pay 20,000 euros ($21,400) per person in return.
The plan was approved by a qualified majority of two-thirds, with Poland and Hungary voting against, whose goal at the summit was to challenge the legal validity of the decision.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said in remarks to his country’s state radio on Friday that he will continue to block the new immigration rules until a consensus is reached, calling the proposal a serious threat to Hungary.
“We will only accept a rule if everyone agrees with it, if there is a consensual decision,” he said. “They want to demand that we build immigrant ghettos in Hungary (…) We have no intention of complying with those decisions, we say so openly.”
For his part, his Luxembourg counterpart, Xavier Bettel, indicated that giving in to these demands would set a dangerous precedent.
“The fact is that Poland and Hungary do not agree to the (EU) Treaty,” he told reporters. “It’s already decided, so now we can’t go back and say ‘okay, we don’t agree’ because then the list would open up to all the decisions we’ve made in the last 10 years.”
Before the summit, Poland’s prime minister had insisted that his country would not be forced to accept EU rules on migration, pledging to veto any initiative that might force partners to take in refugees.
“There is an attack on Europe underway. Europe’s borders are not secure. The security of the inhabitants of our continent is at stake,” President Mateusz Morawiecki said in a video statement, adding that he would propose “a secure border plan” to his counterparts.
Poland and Hungary, along with the Czech Republic, refused to accept the migrant quotas hastily imposed by the EU in 2015. The bloc’s highest court ruled in 2020 that they had not respected the bloc’s laws.
The number of people trying to enter the EU without authorization is increasing. Frontex, the community border agency, said 50,300 attempts were registered between January and May, more than double the number for the same period last year and the highest number since 2017. But the number is paltry compared to arrivals in Turkey, Lebanon or Jordan.
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Associated Press writer Vanessa Gera in Warsaw, Poland contributed to this report.
FUENTE: Associated Press
