Foreign minister: UN migration package shouldn’t become basis of reference

Hungary, along with some like-minded countries, including Poland, makes every possible effort so that the United Nations’ global migration package should not become a basis of reference in international law, Péter Szijjártó, Hungary’s foreign minister, told a UN General Assembly session focussing on human rights on Wednesday local time.

“What we said last year, after Hungary, the United States, Poland, the Czech Republic, Israel and Brasil had rejected the UN global migration package, has come true. It was already obvious at the time that the UN, backed by the European Union, would try to implement piecemeal what it had failed to reach in one go,” the minister said.

Since then, the United Nations has drafted a series of resolutions that referred to the global migration and refugee packages, making repeated attempts to incorporate them into international law as a basis of reference, he said.

“Hungary’s position is clear. The global migration package should neither fully, nor partly become part of international law,” Szijjártó said.

The minister warned that the resolutions “being churned out” by the UN now practically relativise border defence and portray it as a human rights issue. For Hungary, however, border defence is a matter of sovereignty and security, he said, adding that violating borders, and supporting and finding excuses for border violators are unacceptable.