European Union takes Czechs, Hungary, Poland to court over refugees

The European Union announced Thursday that it is taking the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland to court for failing to accommodate their fair share of refugees under a plan agreed to by the 28-country bloc two years earlier.

EU nations agreed in September 2015 to relocate 160,000 refugees from Italy and Greece as the countries were pressured by the arrival of hundreds of thousands of migrants that year.

Under the plan, Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic were supposed to take in a combined 10,000 people. But Hungary and Poland have taken none at all, while the Czech Republic has accepted 12. The EU’s executive Commission sought reasons why but was given no adequate explanations.

The Commission announced Thursday that the three “remain in breach of their legal obligations” and “have given no indication that they will contribute to the implementation of the relocation decision.”

Their cases are being referred to EU’s top tribunal, the Court of Justice.

The refugee relocation plan was adopted in a legally-binding vote by a majority of European member states, but not the three refusing to take part.

The plan never worked very well. As of last week, only around 32,000 refugees had been relocated in all.

The dispute has underlined the deep divisions among Europeans over how best to handle the migrant wave, which saw more than 1 million people enter Europe in 2015, mostly from Turkey to the Greek islands and across the Mediterranean to Italy. It has also undermined trust among EU partners.

The Commission’s second in command, Vice-President Frans Timmermans, announced he did his utmost to avoid legal action and that the three could still do something about it as a few thousand people in the Greek islands remain eligible to be distributed.