A boy is helped off a boat carrying migrants and refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos after crossing the Aegean Sea from Turkey on Sunday. European and African leaders are discussing possible joint action on the migration crisis, as Slovenia became the latest EU member to act on its own by barricading its borders. Photo: AFP

Poland will not take in refugees under a hotly contested EU program to distribute them among member states because of the Paris attacks, the country's incoming European affairs minister said on Saturday.

"The European Council's decisions, which we criticized, on the relocation of refugees and immigrants to all EU countries are part of European law," Konrad Szymanski wrote on right-leaning website wpolityce.pl.

Szymanski, who is to take the European affairs portfolio in conservative Prime Minister-designate Beata Szydlo's new government, said Friday's attacks in Paris were "directly" connected both to the migrant crisis as well as French involvement in air strikes on Islamic State positions.

"I would like to make this urgent plea to avoid drawing such swift links to the situation surrounding refugees," Germany's interior minister Thomas de Maiziere said, noting that there have already been "appalling scales of attacks against asylum seekers and asylum seeker shelters."

Denmark on Friday unveiled tough new measures to deter refugees from coming to the country, including police searches of asylum seekers' luggage for valuables and cash. Other measures included a three-year wait for some family reunification claims and a plan to house migrants in tents.

Europe is facing its biggest refugee crisis since the Second World War as hundreds of thousands flee conflicts or oppression in Syria, Iraq or Afghanistan to seek safety overseas.

Under the EU relocation plan, 160,000 refugees registered in frontline states Greece and Italy are to be relocated around the 28-member bloc.

Zhang Bei, an assistant research fellow at the China Institute of International Studies (CIIS), told the Global Times that Europe needs to re-evaluate its policy on the migrants, despite a lack of evidence directly linking refugees and suspects in the attack. "Many European countries continue to figure out a way for refugees to better fit in their society."

Another CIIS expert, Cui Hongjian, said the French will push their government to make adjustments in its migrant policy if it's proven that terrorists were among the refugees flooding into the country, reported China Youth Daily.

"Europe needs to focus on how to solve the root cause of the migrant crisis. On one hand, millions of refugees remain in countries like Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon. If they cannot successfully settle down in those countries, the migrant crisis will get worse," Li Shaoxian, an expert on Arabic studies at Ningxia University, told China National Radio, adding that solving the Syrian crisis is key to stemming the flow of refugees.