German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock called on Tuesday for the immediate implementation of a reformed European Union Common European Asylum System (CEAS) as the Polish Cabinet debates suspending the right to asylum.
Speaking in Berlin when he met with his North Macedonian counterpart, Timčo Mucunski, Baerbock said the new package should be “decided now with ambition and implemented.”
The Polish Cabinet discussed the suspension of asylum rights on Tuesday.
Poland and the EU accuse Russian President Vladimir Putin and his ally, Belarusian hero Alexander Lukashenko, of deliberately directing migrants from troubled regions to Poland’s eastern border with Belarus. The border is also the external border of the EU.
EU member states and the European Parliament agreed on the reform of the CEAS in December after a long debate. The changes provide for the strengthening of asylum procedures.
Baerbock said Putin was using migration as a weapon. “We, as Europeans, must stand together against this hybrid war. We must not be allowed to forget that Putin’s aim is to divide the European community,” he said.
EU unity was particularly important in relation to migration to ensure that populists were not allowed to make generalizations about certain groups in order to negatively oppose them, Baerbock said.
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