EU ‘made wrong decision’ in refugee policy: Polish FM
PR dla Zagranicy
Roberto Galea
14.06.2017 13:37
The European Union “made the wrong decision” in 2015 when it qualified thousands of immigrants as “refugees”, Polish Foreign Minister Witold Waszczykowski has said.
Polish Foreign Minister Witold Waszczykowski. Photo: PAP/Paweł Supernak
The European Commission, the EU’s executive body, has launched a legal procedure against Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic over their refusal to accept migrants from states under pressure in the bloc’s migration crisis.
“We think that in September 2015, the European Union made the wrong decision when it qualified all [the unrelocated] immigrants as refugees,” Waszczykowski said, adding that the “wrong legal structure” was used to classify such people as refugees.
On Wednesday, European Commission spokesman Alexander Winterstein said that Poland and the two other countries have been given one month to respond to an official letter asking them to accept the quotas of migrants allocated to them.
If the commission does not get a reply or deems the response as insufficient, it will send a second letter.
In a separate interview published on Wednesday, Waszczykowski said that Poland is “open to immigration”.
“We accept hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Ukraine,” Waszczykowski said. (rg/pk)