The Polish Prime Minister has rejected EU demands that her country take 7,000 migrants, saying that after the Paris attacks national security must come first.
Beata Szydło, whose conservative Law and Justice Party swept to power last month amid the ongoing European migrant crisis, said she would not honour a commitment by the previous liberal government to take the migrants.
“After the Paris attacks, the situation has changed. We are not prepared to accept the proposed amount of refugees,” she told a press conference.
Explaining the decision, she said her main priority was the “security of Poles above all”.
At least three of the terrorists who attacked Paris exploited the migrant crisis to enter Europe posing as refugees.
Now Polish newspaper Rzeczpospolita reports that Mrs Szydło called for Europe to “rethink” its strategy on distributing migrants amid ongoing security concerns.
She is not the only European leader to express concerns over terrorists entering Europe through the crisis. Earlier this week, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said that “all the terrorists are basically migrants… The question is when they migrated to the European Union”.
He told POLITICO Europe that it was “logical” that the West’s enemies would send terrorists in the wave of migrants currently sweeping Europe, adding: “All of them present a security threat because we don’t know who they are. If you allow thousands or millions of unidentified persons into your house, the risk of … terrorism will significantly increase.”
Mrs Szydło has previously expressed reservations about accepting migrants. Upon formally taking office last week, she made an apparent reference to Germany’s determination to force compulsory migrant quotas on Europe.
“You cannot call it solidarity when some countries try to, in a way, export problems that they have brought on themselves without the participation of other nations, who are now to be burdened with them,” she said.
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