Visegrad Four claim EU migration summit as their own success

Visegrad Four claim EU migration summit as their own success
By Wojciech Kosc in Warsaw July 2, 2018

Leaders of Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic welcomed the conclusions of the weekend EU summit that did away with the compulsory quota system of relocating refugees and migrants.

The Visegrad Four countries have long opposed the quota system. The Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and Poland’s ruling party Law and Justice (PiS) have made migration issues an important part of their platforms, painting migration as a national threat.

In the context of the current political instability in the EU, which grapples with an unstable German government, anti-EU populists in power in Italy, and the refusal of the V4 to participate in the quota system, EU leaders decided to replace it with a voluntary scheme.

Migrants and refugees who will make it to the EU will be “taken charge of” in “controlled centres” – in other words, camps – that the bloc’s member states will set up on a voluntary basis. Relocation and resettlement will also be voluntary, the summit’s conclusions read.

That elicited cheers from the V4 leaders who said the EU finally came to its senses after the group had been proposing voluntary solutions from the start. That drew criticism from countries that have accepted huge numbers of migrants and refugees as well as from human rights organisations.

“Poland’s position about relocation of refugees is now the EU’s position. [We have] managed to stop the pressure [on us] that some of the EU member states have been applying,” Poland’s Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said.

“I appreciate that the discussion has moved from the level of enforcing relocation and mandatory quotas to the level of rigorous external border protection,” said the Slovak PM Peter Pellegrini.

However, little is clear about how the system of the “controlled centres” will work, where the centres will be located and also how the anti-migration governments of the V4 group will help the so-called frontline states – Italy and Greece in particular – to cope with migration.

"Controlled centres" are also dubious from the point of view of human rights as they create a risk of prolonged detention of migrants. The EU deal also hinders NGOs' help for migrants, Human Rights Watch said.

Even under the voluntary system, the Czech Republic will not take in anyone, the Czech PM Andrej Babis said.

The Hungarian PM Viktor Orban also made it clear in a video posted on social media that no migrants will be accepted in Hungary.

“We managed to fend off this proposal [of compulsory relocation] and have our proposal approved, which clearly states that nobody can be resettled to another country without [its] consent,” Orban said.

“Hungary will not become an immigrant country. Hungary will remain a Hungarian country,” Orban added.

Slovakia’s Pellegrini said his country could accept 1,200 people. Morawiecki avoided a clear position when asked by reporters in Brussels about accepting any number of migrants.

The current migration to the EU is low at around 56,000, compared to over a million in 2015, according to data from the International Organisation for Migration.

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