The front page of the day today comes from DennÃk N in Bratislava, Slovakia. It led with an illustration of how many people applied for asylum in the country during a three month period. That number is the lowest, the paper reports, in the European Union. Via Newseum:
In August, Ishaan Tharoor reported for The Washington Post that the government announced it would accept 200 refugees from Syria.
That’s a small number, but it was made all the more glaring by another stipulation — these refugees had to be Christian.
“In Slovakia, we don’t have mosques,” an Interior Ministry spokesman told the Wall Street Journal. Therefore, the official said, “we only want to choose the Christians.”
A month later, William Booth reported for the Post about a town in Slovakia that voted overwhelmingly not to accept refugees. In October, Jake Burman reported for the U.K.’s Express that the country was threatening to leave the European Union over refugee quotas. On Dec. 2, the country filed a lawsuit with the European Court of Justice against the EU’s refugee redistribution plans, Reuters reported.
Slovakia, which is due take in 802 migrants under the scheme, argues it has no power to keep migrants in if they wish to move on to Germany and other richer EU member states. Slovakia has only received 154 asylum requests this year.
