Poland unlikely to adopt UN migration pact: PM

pulse

November 2, 2018 5:47 PM

Poland is unlikely to adopt the UN migration pact, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki told a press conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel

Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said Friday it was unlikely Poland would support the UN migration pact set to be adopted in December, following rejections by Washington, Budapest and Vienna and a cool reception in Prague.

"It is very likely that Poland, like Austria, the Czech Republic or the United States will not be part of the global pact on migration," Morawiecki told reporters speaking alongside German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Warsaw.

"Our rules, our sovereign principles concerning border protection and migration control are a top priority," he told the press conference, a day after his Czech counterpart also expressed misgivings about the pact.

The United Nations' Global Compact for Migration, whose final text was agreed in July after 18 months of negotiations, is set to be adopted during a conference in Morocco on December 10-11.

It lays out 23 objectives to open up legal migration and better manage migratory flows as the number of people on the move worldwide has increased to 250 million, or three percent of the world's population.

The United States quit talks on the pact last December, Hungary's anti-immigration prime minister Viktor Orban rejected it in July and Austria followed suit on Wednesday.

Poland and fellow eastern EU states the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia flatly rejected a German-backed EU plan to introduce a mandatory quota system to distribute migrants and refugees across the bloc, following the 2015 migrant crisis.

EU leaders dropped the mandatory quota plan in June.

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