She also revealed that a Government Crisis Management Team meeting will be held back in Poland on Saturday morning.
“This influx and great wave of immigrants to Europe means that all possible ways of ending this tragedy have to considered,” she said.
“The Polish delegation is going with some very solid proposals,” she noted.
According to the UN's relief agency UNHCR, over 300,000 '“refugees and migrants” have tried to reach Europe across the Mediterranean this year, and 2,500 are believed to have drowned while making the journey.
“These people are dying in the Mediterranean, these people are currently going through terrible dramas," Kopacz said,
“This is undoubtedly a huge challenge for Europe.
“We want to have a common stance,” she added.
Poland has thus far provided asylum to 200 Syrian Christians, via the Warsaw-based Estera Foundation, while the government pledged in July to take a further 2,000 Syrians and Eritreans. These take in 900 people from camps in Lebanon, and 1,100 from camps in Italy and Greece.
This figure is 1,500 less than the EU initially wanted Poland to take, with the civil war in Syria showing no sign of abating.
Prime Minister Ewa Kopacz said on Thursday that Poland is prepared to reconsider upping the number of refugees accepted from war zones, but that it will not take on “automatic quotas,” that are handed down from Brussels.
Kopacz will be joined in Friday's talks by the prime ministers of the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary.
Meanwhile, 300 refugees have broken out of a holding camp in Hungary. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said on public radio that “now we talk about hundreds of thousands but next year we will talk about millions and there is no end to this.
“All of a sudden we will see that we are in a minority in our own continent,” he claimed, striking a less conciliatory note than his Polish counterpart. (nh/rk)
Source: PAP