“Effectively guarding Europe's external borders is the most important point to be successful in all migration issues” Kalinak told Reuters three weeks before he will start chairing meetings of the EU's interior ministers who deal with migration.
 
Slovakia will focus on putting to work a new European Union border guard, as it was already approved in June by European leaders and the European Parliament. Streamlining deportations of migrants with no case for is another top issue for the country, Interior Minister Robert Kalinak said.
 
Kalinak added that Bratislava would also put forward “compromise” proposals on the disputed reform of EU asylum rules. Slovakia and the other so-called Visegrad states -Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic- have opposed Commissions plans to relocate refugees evenly and to penalize states who would refuse to participate in the scheme.
 
Slovakia is mounting a legal challenge to an EU decision to spread out 120.000 asylum seekers, many fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East and Africa, around the bloc.
 
After the result of the UK referendum on EU membership, Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico argued on Thursday that the EU's future cannot be decided by just two or three powerful Western members, in a dig at France and Germany and a plea for more involvement by the bloc's newer ex-communist members.
 
“Crucial decisions about the future of Europe cannot be defined by two, three member states, or the founding states of the EU. The future of the EU can no longer be defined without active involvement of the states that joined after 2004” Mr. Fico told reporters, referring mainly to former communist nations from central and eastern Europe that joint post 2004.
 
Germany, France and Italy held three-way talks on Monday to consider the 'Brexit' vote. Two days earlier, the EU's six founding members, also including Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, had held a meeting of foreign ministers.
 
The so-called Visegrad states, which include Slovakia, are calling for more powers to be returned to EU capitals and a reduction in the role of the executive European Commission in Brussels.
 
“There's a feeling among member states that sometimes they agree something and then the Commission comes up with proposals that don't reflect that” Fico's foreign minister, Miroslav Lajcak, said. “If our citizens understand less and less what the EU is doing, its because there is too much institutions and too little member states.”
 
Lajcak said he would agree to any measure that might reverse the Brexit vote, but Fico acknowledged it was the reality. “The British people have reacted to European policy” he said. “No one has the right to be angry with the British voters.”