Foreign minister: Hungary, Poland not accepting illegal migrants

Resisting all pressure, blackmail and ultimatums, Hungary and Poland will not accept any illegal migrants, Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó said in Warsaw on Thursday, after talks with Polish Interior Minister Joachim Brudzinski.

“As pressure, blackmail and ultimatums mount, Hungarian-Polish cooperation on migration issues is becoming ever stronger and more stable,” Szijjártó told MTI.

Neither country has so far accepted a single illegal migrant; neither will do so in the future, the parties agreed. Poland and Hungary will also refuse to vote in favour of any EU proposal that contains “concrete or abstract proposals for, or even references to, the resettlement quota”, he said.

The two ministers also have similar views on the UN’s draft migration package, Szijjártó said. The document portrays migration as “basically a good and fundamentally unstoppable process”, and urges destination states to exploit its advantages, Szijjártó said.

“Our stance is just the opposite: we think migration is bad, a security risk, and that it can and should be stopped.”

Commenting on the EU’s Dublin IV proposal to use a qualified majority instead of a unanimous vote in the European Council to decide migration policy, Szijjártó said Poland and Hungary both refused to allow Europe to play “the same foul trick as in 2015.” Then, the European Council voted unanimously to declare “the resettlement quota as exclusively voluntary”, only to change this decision later “at a lower ministerial level”, he said.

Szijjártó also met Andrzej Adamczyk, minister of transport and infrastructure. “The energy security of central and eastern Europe is on the cusp of historic change,” Szijjártó said. Investments in the near future are to establish a north-south gas corridor from the Black Sea to the Baltics, he said. From 2022, Hungary expects to have an alternative source of natural gas besides Russian gas, he said.

Featured image: MTI

Source: MTI