Among concerns of being an open door to mass irregular migration to Europe, Hungary has rejected the proposed European Union migration and asylum pact’s crisis regulation.
The decision has been confirmed by the State Secretary of the Interior Ministry, Bence Retvari.
He told a council meeting on the reform of the EU’s migration and asylum package that the regulations currently under discussion would define Europe’s future, security, and economic competitiveness as the composition of its population in the long term.
Retvari said that his country argues that consensus-based decision-making is important on strategic issues, such as the migration part, stressing that qualified majority decisions would bypass individual member countries, which in turn would still have to manage the crisis situations, according to About Hungary.
In addition, he emphasised that his country detained a total of 135,000 irregular migrants at the country’s southern border up to this point. These figures show that the number of detained migrants is larger than the entire year two years ago.
State Secretary considered that the EU’s draft crisis regulation adopted recently is not about protecting the borders but about the further settlement of unlawful migrants. He called the regulation another “migrant magnet” that was pushed through Brussels.
At the same time, the Prime Minister’s political advisor, Balázs Orbán, considered that current news from Lampedusa, which is dealing with an influx of migrants, a clear sign of the failure of the EU’s migration pact, which had been approved in spite of the objections of Hungary as well as Poland.
Orbán emphasised that Hungary’s position is that unlawful migrants must be halted from reaching EU countries, all asylum applications should be assessed outside Europe, and countries of origin and transit must be offered help.
“Under the brutal pressure of migration, Brussels is not part of the solution, but it is partly the problem itself,”
He expressed his hope that a new leader will be needed at the EU institutions next year, during which period the next Parliament elections are set to be held.
Last month, the prime minister’s chief security advisor, György Bakondi, said that the country’s authorities had apprehended about one million migrants at the country’s southern border since 2015.
In addition, Bakondi emphasised that the number of irregular entries has marked an ongoing increase, with authorities apprehending a total of 27,600 people in the first quarter of this year, more than 36,400 in the second and 43,300 in the third quarter of the year.
