Poland would rather pay hefty fines than follow the EU’s new migration pact, saying it would not be “dictated to by Brussels”.
The move would see Poland pay €20,000 for every migrant it refuses to accept.
If the 8 June agreement became law, Poland “won’t comply” and was “entitled to refuse and bear the costs if necessary”, said spokesman Piotr Muller.
Poland would also seek to build a coalition to block the plan at the European Council’s next meeting, he said.
Poland and Hungary voted against the pact in a meeting of interior ministers. Bulgaria, Malta, and Lithuania abstained.
The measure would encourage human traffickers to send more people into Europe, Muller said to public broadcaster TVP Info.
As long as his ruling PiS party remained in power, “we won’t allow illegal migrants to come to Poland without our will” Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki told an 11 June rally.
Morawiecki would make migration an issue in autumn’s parliamentary elections, he signalled. The PiS won power in 2015 in a previous migrant crisis.
Migration was a matter of security and sovereignty, Morawiecki said. “For us, the most important thing is the security of Polish families, the security of Polish women and the security of Polish children,” he told the rally.
The EU had provided too little help with the “real migrants” from Ukraine, paying €50-60 per refugee, he said.
Migrants mainly enter Poland from its border with Belarus. Meanwhile, Belarusian President Lukashenko has encouraged migration to retaliate for Polish support for his country’s opposition.
The European Commission and Frontex have supported Polish border enforcement efforts, fearing another EU migration crisis. But under pressure from southern European countries, the Commission began discussing attempts at sharing migrants rather than simply stopping migration.
Poland’s current conservative government has called for strengthening EU borders and helping the countries sending migrants. However, it has not stopped legal inward migration from Asia, and accepted hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees.
