The European Commission has proposed a new Pact on Migration and Asylum for the European Union in the hope that it will solve the deep-seated political crisis that the issue of migration continues to pose in the EU.
The European Union remains fundamentally divided over the question of migration into the continent and has been so for years. During the 2015 migration crisis, when EU leaders agreed to relocate 160,000 migrants and refugees from camps in Italy and Greece, assigning each EU member state a fixed quota, Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic refused to receive migrants. The refusal prompted the European Commission, in 2017, to start proceedings against the three countries at the Court of Justice of the European Union. In April 2020, the Court ruled that Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic had broken EU law by refusing to participate in the EU’s relocation agreement.
