MOSCOW (Sputnik) – On May 16, the European Commission issued a progress report on relocation and resettlement, stressing that some countries, in particular, Hungary, Poland and Austria were the only EU members that had not relocated a single person, while the Czech Republic remained inactive for a year.
"The European Commission has today sent reasoned opinions to the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland for non-compliance with their legal obligations on relocation. Despite repeated calls for action and the launch of infringement procedures by the Commission last month, these three countries remain in breach of their legal obligations and have shown disregard for their commitments to Greece, Italy and other Member States," the commission said in a statement.
"Given that the Council Decisions on relocation were adopted in response to an emergency situation and in view of the repeated calls to the three Member States, the authorities of the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland now have one month to respond to the reasoned opinion, instead of the customary two-month deadline. If no reply is received, or if the observations presented in the reply are not satisfactory, the Commission may decide to move to the next stage of the infringement procedure, and refer the case to the Court of Justice of the EU," the commission said.
Bot provided counter-arguments to the claims made by Bratislava and Budapest, and insisted that the decision was "a non-legislative act," based on the provisions of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU), and therefore had not violated any EU legislation and legal procedures. He also noted the provisional nature of the decision, due to its limited time frame (from September 25, 2015 to September 26, 2017).
In December 2015, Slovakia and Hungary filed a lawsuit at the European Court of Justice against the European Union's mandatory quota system, which means to relocate 160,000 asylum seekers across all member states within two years. The two countries claimed that the adoption of such a decision had an inappropriate legal basis, while the proposed measures themselves would not help to resolve the migration crisis.
