Sharing the Refugee Burden through Relocation: Attitudes of the States of the Visegrad Group

This bachelor thesis deals with refugee burden-sharing by mandatory relocation mechanism in the European Union and with positions of the states of the Visegrad Group on the issue. The topic is limited to 2015 in terms of time. Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia, that is to say, were prominent opponents of the refugee relocation plan as one of the proposed and finally adopted solutions to the so-called refugee crisis in the EU. The aim of this thesis is to answer the question whether the states attitudes on sharing the refugee burden undergone some evolution and whether publicly declared reasons for these attitudes correspond to the empirical situation. For this purpose is provided a reconstruction of the most significant milestones of adoption of the relocation mechanism, including the attitudes and publicly declared reasons of the Visegrad states, which are then analyzed in terms of the empirical situation. The outcome of the thesis is that states of the Visegrad Group held integrated negative attitude consistently during 2015 with only one exception - Poland agreement with the proposal submitted to the European Council on 22 September - and most of the reasons given for this negative attitude are really based on the empirical situation, though always only in certain aspects of the..