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Central Europe
September 8, 2017 www.intellinews.com I Page 13
European leaders agreed that 160,000 migrants with a plain need for protection should be shared between EU member states over two years.
Hungary, Slovakia, Czechia and Romania, how- ever, voted against the quota plan, which was ac- cepted by a majority vote.
Hungary was asked to take 1,294 asylum seek- ers, and Slovakia 802. Since then, Hungary, along with Poland, has refused to take even one asylum seeker, while Slovakia has accepted around a dozen. Czechia has decline to take any in the past year.
In anticipation of the verdict, Budapest has ap- pealed to the Commission to, out of “solidarity” finance half the €880m cost of a fence being built on Hungary’s southern border. But the request was swiftly rejected by Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker who claimed a lack of soli-
darity on Budapest’s part.
Hungary now fears that EU members will impose a permanent requirement on EU nations to accept quotas. The court verdict only refers to the tempo- rary migrant emergency from September 2015 to September 2017.
Stepping up pressure on the renegade countries, the Commission announced in July that it will ac- celerate the next step in infringement procedures against Hungary, Czechia and Poland for their failure to engage with the quotas scheme.
Bratislava recently said it was disappointed to hear a damning legal opinion from an advisor to the ECJ over its challenge to the measure. PM Fico, unlike his Hungarian counterpart, has, how- ever, largely abandoned his bitter anti-immigra- tion stance since the March 2016 general election in Slovakia.
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