Poland’s government announced today that in the wake of the attacks on Paris, it will no longer participate in the EU’s resettlement plan for the thousands of refugees attempting to reach Europe.
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Poland’s new rightwing government on Saturday seized on the events in Paris to argue that the EU’s response to its migrant crisis was flawed and that the attacks made untenable a Brussels-led scheme to share refugees among member states.
On Saturday Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico said: “We have been saying that there are enormous security risks linked to migration”.
But “after the tragic events of Paris we do not see the political possibility of respecting them”, he said.
Poland must retain complete control of its borders, as well as its asylum and migration policy, Szymanski insisted.
Witold Waszczykowski, Poland’s rising foreign minister, voiced his concerns as well, saying Europe needed to “approach in a different fashion the Muslim community living in Europe which hates this continent and wishes to destroy it”.
Konrad Szymanski, who will take the office on Monday as part of the country’s new conservative government, said his cabinet didn’t agree with their predecessors’ commitment to take a share in the refugee burden.
Poland in September broke ranks with its ex-communist partners from the “Visegrad group” – Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia – by backing an European Union plan to distribute 120,000 refugees from Italy and Greece across the 28-nation bloc. The nine European Union member countries in central and eastern Europe were scheduled to take only 15,000 of the first batch of refugees, half the number France and Germany are scheduled to absorb between them.
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Writing in French, he said: “I think in regards to the casualties, the wounded, the saving services”. Speaking to reporters as he laid a wreath outside the French embassy in Warsaw for the Paris victims, Szymanski said Poland would only take in immigrants if we have security guarantees.
