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The Czech minister of the interior, Vít Rakušan, says that the country’s presidency of the EU wants to treat migration as an issue facing all of the bloc’s states.

Mr. Rakušan made the comment in Prague on Thursday during a meeting with counterparts from Slovakia, Hungary and Austria. He said the states could offer a regional view of the crisis of refugees entering Europe.

Mr. Rakušan said countries in the region were seeking solutions to the pressure that migration on the Western Balkans route was placing on them.

Thursday’s talks came a day before a gathering of all of the EU’s interior ministers in Brussels.

Czechia currently holds the six-month revolving presidency of the bloc.

The top Czech MMA fighter Jiří Procházka requires a shoulder operation that will keep him out for at six months. The UFC light heavyweight champion was due to face Glover Teixeir of Brazil in a title fight in the US in a fortnight’s time.

Procházka, who is 30, says he is ready to defend his title at any time when he has recovered from the injury, which he sustained in training in Las Vegas.

The interior ministers of the Czech Republic, Austria, Slovakia and Hungary are discussing the issue of migration in Prague on Thursday, one day ahead of the extraordinary meeting of EU interior ministers in Brussels called by Czech interior minister Vít Rakušan. Mr. Rakušan told the Czech News Agency that the main topic on Thursday's agenda will be the current situation on the Western Balkan migration route and its impact on Central Europe. Friday's extraordinary meeting was called to deal with the disputes surrounding the introduction of border controls inside the Schengen area and the reception of migrants picked up in the Mediterranean.

The increase in the number of migrants arriving in the EU in recent months has put a strain on relations between some EU member states. Some countries, including the Czech Republic, reacted to the situation by introducing border controls, which created tensions in Czech-Slovak relations.

Friday's second agenda item refers to the recent dispute between Italy and France over a humanitarian ship carrying migrants rescued from the Mediterranean, to which Italy refused entry. After waiting at sea for two weeks to be assigned a port, the ship finally docked in France. After this incident, France strengthened border controls with Italy.

The government has approved a draft law on the protection of whistleblowers, despite critics of the proposal who say that it does not go far enough. The Pirates party, for example, criticised the fact that the law in its current formulation does not apply to anonymous tipoffs and that it does not apply to the reporting of all crimes.

Previous efforts to pass such a law in the Czech Republic have repeatedly failed, with previous proposals consistently rejected. According to Minister of Justice Pavel Blažek, this draft is one that stands a chance of passing through the lower house and the Senate, but he did not rule out possible future amendments.

The head of the Pirates party Ivan Bartoš said that the current proposal is worse than the draft prepared by the previous government, and that his party did not vote in favour of it at Wednesday's Cabinet meeting.

Anti-corruption organizations have also criticised the law, saying the proposed rules are complicated and unclear and that there is a risk that whistleblowers will continue to be insufficiently protected from retaliation by employers.