NGO Helsinki Committee to sue Fidesz over immigration row

Budapest (MTI) – The Helsinki Committee will file a suit against the ruling Fidesz party for its “false and defamatory” comments published on Friday, the human rights NGO said.

The statement by Fidesz said the Helsinki Committee was a “fake civil organisation working on political commission from its financing international speculators”. It also said the Helsinki Committee was doctoring data on immigration.

Andras Giro-Szasz, the communications state secretary, said on Thursday that four-fifths of asylum-seekers last year were “economic migrants” from a safe country rather than a war zone. He said fully 35,000 came from such countries, dismissing data published by the Helsinki Committee. The Helsinki Committee’s statement that three quarters of applicants are fleeing from war zones is refutable, Giro-Szasz told commercial ATV’s news portal.

The Hungarian Helsinki Committee said in a statement on Friday that while in the first two months of 2015 Kosovars were in majority among asylum-seekers, starting from March the majority of applicants were from war-conflict countries. According to official statistics, 65 percent of asylum-seekers in March and 70 percent in April were from Afghanistan, Syria or Iraq, it said.

Source: http://mtva.hu/hu/hungary-matters