PARIS - President Emmanuel Macron told Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki on Wednesday that France and other EU nations stood by Warsaw over its confrontation with Belarus but that did not mean the bloc would overlook concerns about the rule of law.
Macron and Morawiecki held talks in Paris as European capitals grapple with what European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen has called an attempt by Belarus to use migrants to destabilise the European Union.
Macron "reaffirmed his solidarity with Poland in the face of the destabilisation efforts it faces on its eastern border", the French presidency said in a statement.
It added: "They also discussed the issue of rule of law in Poland. The president reiterated his concerns on this matter and called on the Polish government to find a solution that safeguarded the core values of the European Union."
Thousands of migrants are stranded on the EU's eastern border. Poland, Lithuania and Latvia are bearing the brunt of what the EU says is Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko's ploy to engineer a crisis by flying migrants into Belarus and then pushing them across EU borders.
The crisis comes at a time when Brussels is locked in a long-running dispute with Warsaw over the independence of Poland's judiciary and press freedoms.
In October, Poland's judiciary questioned the supremacy of EU law in a court ruling, a move the EU interpreted as a direct challenge to the unity of the European legal order and which raised fears that Poland could eventually exit the bloc.