Czech Republic and Poland call on EU to do more to tackle irregular migration

PRAGUE — The prime ministers of Czech Republic and Poland said Wednesday that the European Union has to do more to tackle unauthorized migration and condemned the practice of renewing border checks among the bloc’s 27 member states.

“We have agreed that it’s 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 endorsed by EU nations in May are “insufficient,” and should be more strict.

Hungary and Poland, which have long opposed any obligation for countries to host migrants or pay for their care, voted against the package but were unable to block it. Czech Republic abstained from the vote.

“We also have a negative view of the reestablishing of long-term border checks at the inside borders of the European Union,” Fiala said.

Tusk echoed that.

“The task for the EU is to protect its outside borders and to minimize illegal migration rather than create internal borders or seek mechanisms for relocating groups of illegal migrants back and forth within Europe,” Tusk said.

Irregular migration dominated the European Parliament election in June and influenced 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 was expanding border controls around its territory following recent extremist attacks.

Tusk, whose country is taking over the EU’s rotating presidency in January, said that he would present his long-term plan to deal with migration on the EU level on Saturday.

He specifically mentioned migration pressures on 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 engaged in fighting” every day on the border where the situation resembles a “wartime landscape.”

___

Monika Scislowska contributed to this report from Warsaw, Poland.

___

Follow AP’s coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/migration