Poland, Hungary mount resistance to EU asylum policy plans

Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki says Warsaw will not participate in the planned distribution of migrants across the European Union, one day after EU interior ministers agreed on a deal aimed at tightening asylum rules, including mandatory quotas.
Morawiecki said as long as his conservative Law and Justice party (PiS) was in power, "we won't allow any migration quotas for refugees from Africa, from the Middle East, for Arabs, Muslims or whoever to be imposed on us."
Poland had successfully managed the biggest refugee crisis since World War II, Polish European Affairs Minister Szymon Szynkowski vel Sek wrote on Twitter, referring to the fact that the country has taken in 1.6 million war refugees from Ukraine. "We will not accept absurd ideas being imposed on us."
EU asylum policy has long been a thorny issue. The interior ministers of the member states reached an agreement to tighten rules on Thursday, in the face of rising migration figures.
The deal entails the processing of asylum seekers in reception facilities at the bloc's external borders.
If an applicant has no chance of obtaining asylum in the EU, he or she would be sent back immediately.
In order to lighten the burden on countries like Italy, which are receiving the majority of the people trying to reach the EU due to their location at the bloc's external border, the deal also foresees the establishment of a mandatory system to distribute an agreed amount of asylum seekers among EU member states.
So far, it has been up to the individual EU states to comply with such quotas.
EU countries unwilling or unable to accept relocated migrants would give help in the form of financial support amounting to €20,000 ($21,500) per person.
Poland, Hungary, Malta, Slovakia and Bulgaria did not support the reform plans.
Budapest also slammed the agreement on Friday, with parliamentary state secretary at the Hungarian Interior Ministry, Bence Retvari, accusing Brussels of "abusing its power" and planning to "turn every country in Europe into an immigration country at any price."
With the new plans, the EU was aiming to distribute migrants "by force," Retvari told Hungarian state television.
The EU does not recognize that Hungary is protecting the EU's external border and refuses to pay the corresponding costs of €1.5 billion, Retvari said, referring to the border fence built by Hungary in 2015 on the border with Serbia.
The European Parliament, which will now start to debate the plans, can still negotiate changes.
Thursday's agreement also sparked a stir in EU countries with a more moderate stance on migration, including in Germany.
"This is not a small step," government spokesman Steffen Hebestreit said in Berlin on Friday, but he added that "there were also some bitter pills to swallow."
German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock of the Green Party said the decision was "very difficult as foreign minister, as a Green and also personally," in a letter to the her party's parliamentary group.
She nevertheless considers the agreement to be the right one, because it will improve the status quo for many refugees.
The Greens had been criticized that the plans are at odds with the party's traditionally refugee-friendly policies.
German Green Party leader Omid Nouripour told Deutschlandfunk radio on Friday: "We have always pushed for families to be completely exempted, for vulnerable groups not to get into these border procedures. That has not been achieved."
Meanwhile, the co-chair of Germany's hard-left opposition party Die Linke, Janine Wissler, spoke in a statement on Friday of a "direct attack on the right to asylum."
"Segregation and detention of families with children fleeing war and hunger is not a 'historic success,' as Interior Minister Faeser calls it, but an attack on human rights."
Germany's largest pro-immigration advocacy group Pro Asyl also blasted the reforms, saying they were "a head-on attack on the rule of law and refugee law."
"When refugees are locked up during border procedures in order to deport them to unsafe countries, this no longer has anything to do with human rights and the rule of law," said spokesman Karl Kopp.
The agreement was made at the expense of human rights and the people who need the most protection, Amnesty International Germany said, while Doctors Without Borders Germany thinks the decision will have disastrous consequences for people in need of protection.