The EU summit in Brussels failed with the plan to adopt a joint declaration on the controversial issue of migration. Instead, EU Council President Charles Michel now wanted to publish his own text, as an EU official announced on Friday. Poland and Hungary prevented a unified line at the meeting of heads of state and government.
At the two-day summit, the governments in Warsaw and Budapest resisted the EU interior ministers’ compromise on asylum at the beginning of June. According to this, both states are to pay 20,000 euros for each refugee that they do not accept from arrival countries such as Italy or Greece.
According to Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, Poland insisted on a clarification from the EU summit “that the procedure (of the redistribution of the refugees) remains voluntary”. However, the other EU countries rejected this.
Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo regretted the failure of a joint declaration and called the procedure “extraordinary”. However, he referred to a similar case in 2017, when the member countries could not have reached an agreement either.
