BUDAPEST (AFP) – Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban yesterday slammed as “unacceptable” a European Union (EU) agreement to revise the bloc’s rules on member states hosting asylum-seekers and migrants.
“Brussels is abusing its power. They want to relocate migrants to Hungary with force. This is unacceptable, they want to forcefully turn Hungary into a migrant country,” Orban wrote on Facebook.
The agreement reached by EU interior ministers in Luxembourg on Thursday revised the bloc’s rules on sharing the hosting of asylum-seekers and migrants more equitably.
The deal – which needed approval from a majority of countries representing at least 65 per cent of the bloc’s population – comes after years of wrangling over asylum policy.
The proposal introduced at the meeting on Thursday called for compulsory help between EU member countries, but with an option of doing that in one of two ways.
The priority is for EU countries to share the hosting of asylum-seekers, taking in many that arrive in nations on the bloc’s outer rim, mainly Greece and Italy.
The agreement said nations that refuse would instead be required to pay a sum of EUR20,000 (USD21,000) per person into a fund managed by Brussels.
But Poland and Hungary voted against the proposals, while Bulgaria, Malta, Lithuania and Slovakia abstained.
The EU is “eliminating (member states’) say in who resides in their territories”, Hungary’s Deputy Interior Minister Bence Retvari told the Hungarian state news agency MTI yesterday.
Retvari said the new distribution mechanism would “basically allow illegal migrants or the human traffickers who brought them to Europe to decide themselves who will live in Europe”.
Some of the proposals had been distributed “minutes, at most half an hour” ahead of the votes on Thursday, said Retvari.
“Pro-migration governments” had “pressured” other member states to approve the proposals, he said.
