Hungarian FM: Two approaches to migration – Budapest Process forum in Istanbul

“It has now become clear that migration can be approached from two entirely different directions,” Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó told MTI in Istanbul on Wednesday, after a ministerial meeting in the Budapest Process forum.

At the conference, representatives of the European Commission “all did their best to highlight how good migration is for Europe” and insisted that further migration trends are needed, the minister said.

Szijjártó said that “the unity of central Europe has again been demonstrated” adding that Austria and Italy joined the four Visegrad countries and declined to sign the meeting’s closing document and its action plan.

“These countries do not at all accept the position that migration is good and it should be promoted,” Szijjártó said.

Migration poses “further and extreme” risks for Europe, the minister insisted. He said former members of the Islamic State terrorist organisation recently had been arrested in Bosnia-Herzegovina and North Macedonia, calling those developments “alarming”. He insisted that IS terrorists were returning to Europe “by the hundreds”, increasing the threat of terrorism. “This must be stopped,” he said.

The situation in the Western Balkans is “more and more dramatic”,

Szijjártó said. He argued that currently there are 25,000 illegal migrants in Bosnia-Herzegovina, while illegal migration to Greece has increased by one third.

On the sidelines of the conference, Szijjártó had bilateral talks with Turkey‘s interior minister Suleyman Soylu, Greek migration minister Dimitris Vitsas, Polish interior minister Joachim Brudzinski, Croatian interior minister Davor Bozinovic, Bosnia-Herzegovina’s national security minister Dragan Mektic, Serbian interior minister Nebojsa Stefanovic, and Oliver Spasovski, the interior minister of North Macedonia.

Source: MTI