PRAGUE (AP) — The prime ministers of the Czech Republic and Poland said Wednesday that the European Union must do more to tackle unauthorized migration and condemned the practice of renewing border controls between the bloc’s 27 member states.
“We agree that it is necessary to do more,” Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala said after meeting with Polish counterpart Donald Tusk and other members of his government in Prague.
Fiala said that sweeping reforms to the bloc’s asylum system adopted by EU countries in May are ‘insufficient’ and should be stricter.
Hungary and Poland, which have long opposed any obligation for countries to host migrants or pay for their care, voted against the package but failed to block it. The Czech Republic abstained from voting.
“We also have a negative view of the restoration of long-standing border controls at the internal borders of the European Union,” Fiala said.
Tusk repeated that.
“The EU’s task is to protect its external borders and minimize illegal migration, rather than creating internal borders or seeking mechanisms for the movement of groups of illegal migrants back and forth within Europe,” Tusk said.
Irregular migration dominated the Elections for the European Parliament in June and has influenced the recent state elections in eastern Germany, where a far-right party won for the first time since World War II. The German government announced in September that it would expand border controls around its territory following recent extremist attacks.
Tusk, whose country takes over the EU’s rotating presidency in January, said he would present his long-term plan for tackling migration at EU level on Saturday.
He specifically mentioned migratory pressure at the Poland-Belarus border, for which he blames authoritarian Belarusian President Aleksander Lukashenko and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Tusk said that “thousands of Polish soldiers, police officers and border guards are involved in fighting every day” at the border, where the situation resembles a “warscape.”
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Monika Scislowska contributed to this report from Warsaw, Poland.
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