Hungary will not implement new European Union rules on mandatory resettlement quotas and “migrant ghettos”, a Hungarian politician also serving as a Member of the European Parliament from Hungary, Tamás Deutsch has said.
His comments came during an interview on public radio while considering the EU’s behaviour “sour grapes.
According to him, decision-makers were meting out “political punishment” after they believed the country’s model for dealing with unlawful migration was legally objectionable.
In addition, Deutsch stressed that more than one-quarter of a million unlawful migrants had been detained at the country’s common border with Serbia, while the figures reached over one million in the past five years.
He noted that the practice in Western Europe driven by a multicultural ideology of granting unlawful migrants the “all clear” had led to “near catastrophic” results.
Previously, the European Commission introduced a new proposal that would help EU countries to manage new arrivals through three new options: accept a specific number of people seeking asylum in their countries, pay a fee of €10,000 and € 22,000 per migrant, or finance operational support.
But the idea was not unanimously supported by EU countries. Authorities in Hungary stressed that further steps on migration reform would be taken voluntarily and by consensus.
However, the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, said that migration reform would be done by a “qualified majority”.
Von der Leyen’s comments came as a response to Hungary and Poland after these two countries didn’t support the new proposal.
“That’s what the treaties say, and that’s what we have delivered on,” the EC President noted, according to a Euronews report.
While Brussels proposal was not supported by Hungary and Poland, some other countries, such as Austria, Italy, as well as the Netherlands, considered this plan as not good enough. At the same time, other countries such as Slovakia, Malta, Bulgaria and Lithuania abstained.
Deputy Minister of the Interior in Lithuania, Arnoldas Abramavičius, noted that despite the efforts to offer flexibility to the solidarity mechanism, the proposal consists of provisions with which Lithuania cannot agree.
Authorities in EU countries are continuously dealing with an influx in the number of arrivals. The figures of the European Union Border and Coast Guard Agency revealed that for a period from January until April this year, over 80,700 people attempted to reach the bloc in an unlawful way, thus accounting for an increase of 30 per cent compared to the same period last year’s figures.
