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The Czech Republic will accept no new migrants this year under EU plans, Interior Minister Milan Chovanec said on Monday in Brussels. Mr Chovanec criticised the EU’s hot spot system which has so far seen only a small number from tens of thousands of refugees in Italy and Greece relocated to other parts of the EU.

The Czech Republic will insist that the principle of the free movement of people within the European Union be maintained, the country’s prime minister, Bohuslav Sobotka, said on Tuesday. He was reacting to proposals from his UK counterpart David Cameron to reform the bloc. Czech Finance Minister Andrej Babiš made a similar statement, describing Mr. Cameron’s ideas as unacceptable. The Czech state secretary for European affairs, Tomáš Prouza, said that Prague supported that which moved the EU forward and could not support that which divided it.

A new poll released by the STEM agency suggests that one-third of Czechs think that membership in NATO is more important than membership in the European Union. According to the poll, the country’s membership in NATO has support from 69 percent of those asked; around half of respondents ranked membership in the EU as equally important. Over the years, the importance of NATO for Czechs has grown steadily. The Czech Republic joined the European Union in 2004.

The Czech Republic’s economy should grow by 4.3 percent in 2015, compared to last year’ two percent, according to a newly released macro-economic forecast by the European Commission. The solid growth is expected to drop sharply to 2.2 percent in the following year. The European Commission attributes the uneven growth to a slowdown in drawing of EU funds in 2016. According to the prognosis, economic growth should increase again to 2.7 percent in 2017.

Three-fifths of Czechs are dissatisfied with the country’s EU membership and would vote against it in a possible referendum, suggests a poll conducted by the STEM agency, which was released on Friday. It is the lowest public support for the EU that STEM has registered since the Czech Republic’s EU entry in May 2004. According to sociologists, the rising discontent is connected with the current migrant crisis and with Czechs' fear of refugees. At present, a mere 38 percent of people would vote for the EU entry, which is the lowest share so far. Satisfaction with the EU has considerably decreased even among secondary-school and university graduates, who have traditionally been in favour of EU membership.

Czech Minister of Foreign Affairs, Lubomír Zaorálek, met with Vietnam’s president, Truong Tân Sang, at the presidential palace in Hanoi on Friday. According to Vietnamese media, the Czech foreign minister said the Czech government backed the early completion of negotiations on a free trade agreement between Vietnam and the European Union. Mr Zaorálek, who is accompanied by a business delegation, also appreciated the positive integration of the Vietnamese community in the Czech Republic. The Czech Foreign Minister will conclude his visit of Vietnam on Saturday, and continue with an official visit to Malaysia.

Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka has rejected the accusations levelled against the Czech Republic as “unwarranted”, saying that the country had always striven to adhere to international agreements and laws and was taking the same approach in the migrant crisis. The prime minister said that the conditions in detention centers were good and the demands made on migrants were reasonable and UN inspectors were welcome to come and judge the situation for themselves. “We will be happy to show them all our migrant facilities, which we have expanded in the last few months to give migrants more space and better conditions,” Mr. Sobotka said. The prime minister said that in his view Czech migrant facilities had become an issue because a number of Czech organizations had put them in the spotlight.

Reacting to criticism from the European Commission, the Czech minister of the interior, Milan Chovanec, said the country had this year detained 7,000 illegal migrants, of whom 460 were at present in detention centres. All others have been returned to the nearest state that they came from, he said. The European Commission recently sent a letter to the Czech Interior Ministry, asking officials to account for the fact that the country was only returning 13 percent of illegal migrants, lower than the EU average of 39. Mr. Chovanec told a conference in Prague that Europe needed to resolve the migration crisis in a democratic, humane, legal way that was in the interest of individual states.

The European Commission has asked the Czech Republic to explain why it is failing to expel illegal migrants, public broadcaster Czech Radio reported on Tuesday – referring to a letter the commission sent to the Czech Interior Ministry earlier this month. The Czech Republic has returned only 13 percent of illegal migrants, compared with the EU´s average of 39 percent, the commission wrote. It asked the Interior Ministry to submit a list of measures to improve the situation, adding it considered the returning of illegal migrants crucial for reducing overall numbers. According to Eurostat figures cited by the commission, the Czech Republic ordered 2,460 people to leave Czech territory last year, but in fact it expelled only 320. The Interior Ministry says a large part of those who stay illegally in the Czech Republic are people with expired residence permits.

The presidents of the Visegrad Four countries, together with the Croatian head-of-state, have agreed on the necessity for the European Union’s outer borders to be strengthened in the face of the migrant crisis. Hungarian President Janos Ader spoke with reporters after their two-day meeting on Friday. Hungary, along with Croatia, both face a strong influx of refugees from the Middle East and north Africa. The five presidents also agreed that detention centres for asylum seekers should be established in Turkey through which many refugees were coming to Europe. Czech president Miloš Zeman criticized the EU, saying it had proven “zero ability” to protect its outer borders.