Latest news with #AdamSzlapka
Bloomberg
15-07-2025
- Politics
- Bloomberg
Polish Government Set for Reshuffle Next Week, Spokesman Says
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk's cabinet will be reshuffled next week after a delay stoked by a junior coalition partner, government spokesman Adam Szlapka told TVN24 on Tuesday. The government, which was weakened by the defeat of its candidate in last month's presidential elections, still enjoys a 'stable majority' in parliament, Szlapka said. He doesn't see risk of any junior partners leaving the nearly two-year-old coalition.
Times
04-07-2025
- Politics
- Times
Why Germany's border gambit threatens the EU's asylum rule book
At the hamlet of Lubieszyn, next to the red and white-striped pillars that mark the Polish side of the frontier with Germany, volunteers in high-vis jackets stop passing cars and check for migrants. At another border crossing near by, a gazebo displays the slogan: 'This is our Polish home, our rules.' Approximately 160 miles to the south, on the Pope John Paul II Bridge across the river Neisse where the Polish town of Zgorzelec meets the chocolate-box German city of Görlitz, a group of women in yellow vests staff a tent that bears the words: 'Stop immigration.' This is the Border Defence Movement, a vigilante organisation that has been mounting 'citizens' patrols' along the German frontier in protest against Berlin's decision to start routinely turning back irregular migrants into Poland. With a political storm brewing in Warsaw, the Polish government has been stung into imposing its own temporary checkpoints on the border from Monday, as well as similar measures on its northeastern frontier with Lithuania. On Friday the army announced that it would send 5,000 Polish servicemen to support the border guards along the frontiers with Germany and Lithuania. Adam Szlapka, Poland's Europe minister, said: 'The situation is asymmetrical. Germany is causing incidents by sending migrants back to Poland without making sure that they will be picked up by Polish border guards, and they have their own statistics, we don't. 'We need to have control over migration. We need to know who is entering Poland and whether they are persons returned in accordance with due procedures or not.' He later warned the vigilantes patrolling the border to stand down. Speaking after a hastily convened security meeting in Warsaw, he said: 'Only the border guard has the right to control our borders. Anyone impersonating officers or hindering their work will face consequences.' • Merz: Strict asylum policy needed to stop Germany becoming overloaded This is not how the free-travel Schengen zone was supposed to look. Yet these ructions are the result of what allies of Friedrich Merz, Germany's conservative chancellor, characterise as a paradoxical gamble to save Europe's freedom of movement by restricting it. Merz took power two months ago after a Bundestag election where the hard-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party came within two percentage points of beating his Christian Democratic Union. Days later, the AfD pulled ahead of the CDU and its Bavarian affiliate in the polls. Under intense pressure to curb irregular immigration, Merz's government has been churning out policies. It has suspended most refugees' rights to bring their relatives to Germany. It has also proposed negotiations with the Taliban over a deal to send Afghan criminals back to their country of origin. Merz's confidants have even signalled that they would like to clip the wings of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg so that its judges have to define certain asylum rights more narrowly. Yet the centrepiece of its strategy is an order for border police to turn back virtually all asylum seekers across Germany's 2,300-mile land frontier. Aside from 'vulnerable' groups such as pregnant women or unaccompanied children, migrants who cannot prove that they have a right to enter the country are told to retrace their steps. The basic idea is that EU rules oblige asylum seekers to lodge an application with the first member state they set foot in. Since Germany is surrounded by other EU states, that means virtually all of the asylum seekers that come to the country should theoretically be processed somewhere else. Usually this is a laborious and time-consuming process that often fails because of missing documents. Merz's administration argues that it can dispense with the process entirely since the volume of irregular immigration is a 'national emergency'. Heiko Teggatz, the chairman of the federal police branch of the German Police Union, which is responsible for border security, said that the turnbacks at the frontier were a straightforward procedure in practice. 'The foreigner is simply not permitted to enter,' he said. 'You could also call it a 'dismissal' at the border.' The migrants are photographed and have their fingerprints taken and logged in a national database, so that if they do cross the border and apply for asylum at a later date their application can be automatically rejected. This measure, introduced two days after Merz took office, has been immensely controversial within Germany itself. Judges have been chipping away at its legal foundation. Last month the administrative court in Berlin ruled that the rejection of three Somali asylum seekers at the Frankfurt an der Oder border crossing with Poland had broken EU law and there was no evidence of a national emergency that would justify suspending the normal processes. While the interior ministry insists that the verdicts apply only to the individual cases in question, the president of the federal administrative court — effectively the top judge in the German asylum system — has suggested that the whole policy may be unlawful. Andreas Rosskopf, head of the border police division of the Gewerkschaft der Polizei, the main German police union, said he was concerned that officers could be prosecuted for carrying out unlawful orders from their superiors on the frontier. This week the policy has also come under fire from Angela Merkel, Merz's predecessor as chancellor, and from his Social Democratic party coalition partner. Yet the criticism in Germany is mild in comparison with the furore in Poland. MPs from the right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) opposition party have accused the Germans of dumping thousands of 'illegal immigrants' on Polish soil every day. President Duda and his incoming successor Karol Nawrocki, both of whom are aligned with PiS, have endorsed the Border Defence Movement patrols. Agnieszka Kasinska-Metryka, professor of political science at Kielce University in Poland, said many voters were left with the impression that the Polish government had lost control of the border and 'citizens had to take matters into their own hands'. In response, Donald Tusk, Poland's beleaguered centre-right prime minister, said that his patience with Berlin was 'becoming exhausted' and it was time to tackle the 'uncontrolled flows of migrants across the Polish-German border'. German officials feel that the issue has been blown up out of all proportion to the reality of the policy. A Times analysis of German and Polish government data suggests they have a point. Provisional figures from the German interior ministry show that only 28 would-be asylum seekers were turned away at the Polish border under the 'national emergency' mechanism over the first fortnight after it came into force. Approximately 1,350 people have been turned back on the Polish-German border since May 8, but only 128 of them under the new rule. Across all of Germany's borders, the number of migrants denied entry last month was in fact at its lowest level for any June since 2021, possibly because migration flows into Europe as a whole have ebbed over the past few years. Polish statistics also show that since the start of May the German border guards have turned back an average of 724 migrants into Poland each month, compared with 782 a month over the same period in 2024. Rosskopf said the Polish and German border forces tended to coordinate fairly well in practice, although handing over responsibility for the rejected asylum seekers was often a 'lengthy and complicated' job. However, Rosskopf is worried that after the Polish border controls kick in next week, migrants may find themselves in a 'ping-pong' situation where neither side will let them pass. 'On Monday we might see that we as the German federal police are turning people back at the German-Polish border and our Polish colleagues won't take them in at all, or will turn them back after a short delay,' he said. 'In our view this situation absolutely must be avoided. People cannot be allowed to be turned into footballs by political decisions.' Both sides of the dispute insist they share the same ultimate aim: to fix the Schengen zone by reshaping the European asylum system. 'We believe that the Schengen area is a monumental achievement,' Szlapka said. 'Our interior ministers are in contact, and inevitably, we must reach a situation in which we are jointly fighting illegal immigration, while within the Schengen area we want the flow of people to remain free.' Later this month the two countries' interior ministers will join colleagues from similarly hawkish EU states such as Denmark and Austria on the Zugspitze, Germany's highest mountain, to try and forge a joint position. The Germans, who are hosting the meeting, would like to lead a push to facilitate deportations to Rwanda-style 'return hubs' outside the bloc. Yet there is considerable mutual mistrust. The domestic politics of immigration has reached such a fever pitch in both Poland and Germany that compromise may well remain elusive.
Miami Herald
24-06-2025
- Business
- Miami Herald
EU endorses proposal for environmental deregulation
June 24 (UPI) -- The European Union is set to amend its current ethical supply chain rules after its ambassadors endorsed a simplification bill from the Council of the EU. "Today we delivered on our promise to simplify EU laws," said EU Minister of Poland Adam Szlapka in a press release Monday. "We are taking a decisive step towards our common goal to create a more favorable business environment to help our companies grow, innovate, and create quality jobs." The bill would impact current environmental laws with the intention of shrinking the regulatory pressures on businesses in order to juice up the EU's economy. Two such green rules are the EU's Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive and the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive. These currently insist that all the companies that do business in the EU and have at least 1,000 employees report their environmental effects. The bill would increase the employee threshold that forces a company to comply up to 5,000 employees. Currently, the CSRD and CSDDD also require companies that make at least approximately $522 million in net turnover to monitor their supply chains for environmental and human rights violations. The bill would raise that starting bar to about $1.7 billion. The release said the regulations were being loosened based on the concept that larger companies "are best equipped to absorb the costs and burdens of due diligence processes." The bill would also limit the obligation required for companies to adopt a transition plan to deal with climate change. It would give the EU Council authority to advise companies on how to create and execute such plans. The Council could then give companies up to two years to implement those plans in order to "further reduce burdens and provide companies with sufficient time for adequate preparations." If adopted, less than 1,000 companies would be affected by the CSRD, down from the nearly 50,000 companies that currently must comply. However, should Omnibus pass, there could be legal challenges. The nonprofit ClientEarth Europe environmental organization posted to X Tuesday that "The Omnibus is fueling legal uncertainty and might breach the law too." "A new legal analysis warns of the risk of future legal challenges if the Omnibus is passed into law," the post continued. "The agreement reached by the EU Council last night heightens these risks by further undermining the [CSDDD]. Copyright 2025 UPI News Corporation. All Rights Reserved.
UPI
24-06-2025
- Business
- UPI
EU endorses proposal for environmental deregulation
The European Union endorsed plans to scale back its current ethical supply chain rules. File Photo by Patrick Seeger/EPA-EFE June 24 (UPI) -- The European Union is set to amend its current ethical supply chain rules after its ambassadors endorsed a simplification bill from the Council of the EU. "Today we delivered on our promise to simplify EU laws," said EU Minister of Poland Adam Szlapka in a press release Monday. "We are taking a decisive step towards our common goal to create a more favorable business environment to help our companies grow, innovate, and create quality jobs." The bill would impact current environmental laws with the intention of shrinking the regulatory pressures on businesses in order to juice up the EU's economy. Two such green rules are the EU's Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive and the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive. These currently insist that all the companies that do business in the EU and have at least 1,000 employees report their environmental effects. The bill would increase the employee threshold that forces a company to comply up to 5,000 employees. Currently, the CSRD and CSDDD also require companies that make at least approximately $522 million in net turnover to monitor their supply chains for environmental and human rights violations. The bill would raise that starting bar to about $1.7 billion. The release said the regulations were being loosened based on the concept that larger companies "are best equipped to absorb the costs and burdens of due diligence processes." The bill would also limit the obligation required for companies to adopt a transition plan to deal with climate change. It would give the EU Council authority to advise companies on how to create and execute such plans. The Council could then give companies up to two years to implement those plans in order to "further reduce burdens and provide companies with sufficient time for adequate preparations." If adopted, less than 1,000 companies would be affected by the CSRD, down from the nearly 50,000 companies that currently must comply. However, should Omnibus pass, there could be legal challenges. The nonprofit ClientEarth Europe environmental organization posted to X Tuesday that "The Omnibus is fueling legal uncertainty and might breach the law too." "A new legal analysis warns of the risk of future legal challenges if the Omnibus is passed into law," the post continued. "The agreement reached by the EU Council last night heightens these risks by further undermining the [CSDDD].
Fashion United
24-06-2025
- Business
- Fashion United
EU member states aim to significantly dilute supply chain act
EU member states sought to significantly dilute the European Supply Chain Act. A majority of countries voted to apply the human rights protection law only to companies with more than 5,000 employees, instead of the previous threshold of 1,000, the member states announced. In addition, the turnover threshold was to be raised from 450 million euros to 1.5 billion euros of annual net turnover. Poland's Minister for Europe, Adam Szlapka, stated this would create a decisive step towards a more favourable business environment "that will help our companies grow, innovate and create high-quality jobs". Poland currently held the rotating six-month presidency of the EU member states and, in this role, prepared meetings of ministers, among other things. EU directive aims to protect human rights The Federal Ministry of Labour, responsible for the law, did not initially respond to a request from the German Press Agency (DPA) regarding the German government's position on the EU member states' stance. The European Supply Chain Act was actually passed last year. The aim is to strengthen human rights worldwide. Large companies should be held accountable if they profit from human rights violations such as child labour or forced labour. Following criticism from companies, parts of the directive were to be simplified even before they were applied. Negotiations in european parliament ongoing Discussions were still underway in the European Parliament to determine its position on the reform of the Supply Chain Act. Final negotiations with the EU member states could then begin. The chair of the Internal Market Committee in the European Parliament, Anna Cavazzini (Greens), said the EU member states were making themselves "accomplices of the lobbyists". The EU member states also advocated that companies should no longer have to focus on their suppliers in principle, but only on areas "where actual and potential adverse impacts are most likely". Companies should no longer be obliged to carry out a comprehensive inventory, but instead conduct more general investigations. This article was translated to English using an AI tool. FashionUnited uses AI language tools to speed up translating (news) articles and proofread the translations to improve the end result. This saves our human journalists time they can spend doing research and writing original articles. Articles translated with the help of AI are checked and edited by a human desk editor prior to going online. If you have questions or comments about this process email us at info@
