The legislation has proved controversial and sparked fierce debate among EU member states.

13:17, Wed, Dec 10, 2025 Updated: 13:30, Wed, Dec 10, 2025

POLAND

Migrants attempt to cross into Poland from Belarus (Image: Getty)

Poland has been granted exemption from the EU's controversial Migration and Asylum Pact, as European interior ministers continue to hotly debate the policy. The legislation obliges member states to share the burden of accommodating refugees to relieve the pressure on frontier countries.

Under the scheme, governments must fork out roughly €20,000 per person they refuse to take in, or make contributions to the policing of external borders. However, Brussels recently tweaked the rules to allow countries facing intense migration pressures to opt out of the scheme. Five other countries alongside Poland have since applied for exemption – Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic and Estonia.

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POLAND

Marcin Kierwiński is Polish Interior Minister (Image: Getty)

Warsaw has been lobbying Brussels for months to get recognition of the migration pressures it faces.

Migration has become a toxic issue in Polish politics, with most political parties opposing the current refugee quota system.

Marcin Kierwiński – Poland's Interior Minister – announced on Monday that the EU had accepted Poland's application to quit the scheme. The country claimed exemption based on the high number of Ukrainian refugees houses and its ongoing border struggles with Belarus.

“Poland is released from any relocation mechanism, free also from any costs related to it,” he said. “In this respect we seem to have achieved everything we wanted.”

The minister made his announcement after attending a sitting of the Home Affairs Council in Brussels. He said the council had recognised the extreme immigration pressures Poland was under.

The country is currently hosting over a million refugees from the war in Ukraine. In addition, Poland has been dealing with a migration emergency on its border with Belarus since 2021.

Meanwhile, new data has shown a decrease in the number of migrants heading to Europe over the past year.

Released in November, the European Commission's annual migration assessment showed a drop of 35% in irregular crossings from July 2024 to July 2025.