Warsaw says it won't pay proposed EU charges for refusing migrants

Poland has entered crunch talks aimed at making radical changes to the EU’s migration and asylum laws with the claim that the proposals could result in a “step back” to 2015, when more than a million people flowed into the bloc.

- Lisa O'Carroll Luxembourg

The Polish deputy state secretary of the interior, Bartosz Grodecki, opened the summit of home affairs ministers in Luxembourg by declaring that Warsaw would refuse to pay proposed “fines” for not taking people.

“Politically, pragmatically, this mechanism is unacceptable to us,” he said.

Among the controversial proposals on the table are tools to relieve the pressure felt by frontline countries, including a €22,000 (£19,000) charge for each person a member state says it is unable to host – €2,000 more than the figure that had been put forward on Wednesday.

Poland has argued that it is already hosting almost 1 million Ukrainian refugees, the second largest number in Europe after Germany, and that it has no more political room for manoeuvre.

“There’s no way we can explain to people that if we fail to accept more migrants, we’re going to end up paying through the nose,” Grodecki said.

Diplomats said the probability of a deal being reached on Thursday was no more than 50:50, with one senior source warning that talks, which have been taking place for four years, would only end if ministers felt they could sell the changes back home.