📰Central European countries to boycott Brussels' migration meeting

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has said leaders of the Visegrad Four countries of Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic will skip this weekend's mini-summit on migration in Brussels. He said such meetings of state leaders should be organised by the European Council, the bloc's top decision-making body, not the EU Commission.


*The Commission will organise the smaller summit ahead of a full EU summit next week*, as an attempt to persuade other EU leaders to further curb immigration and restrict movement of asylum seekers within the European Union and help keep Merkel's ruling coalition from crumbling at home.

Speaking after a meeting in Budapest on Thursday, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki described Sunday's meeting as "unacceptable", adding: "We are not going to attend, they want to re-heat a proposal that we've already rejected."

His Hungarian counterpart Viktor Orban said that the meeting was "against the normal customs of the EU" and that the appropriate forum was the EU leaders' summit scheduled for next week. The four were joined at the summit by Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, who has added his voice to calls for a tougher migration policy.