Gergely Gulyás slammed the EU’s top court for ordering Budapest to pay €200 million for flouting asylum rules.
A Hungarian government minister has warned the EU that the country will send migrants to Brussels if the bloc continues to demand that it accept more asylum seekers.
“If Brussels wants migrants, they will get them,” Gergely Gulyás, minister for the prime minister’s office told a press conference on Thursday. “We will give everyone a one-way ticket if the EU makes it impossible to stop migration at the external border.”
The minister made the incendiary remarks in reference to a heavy €200 million fine that the European Court of Justice (ECJ) handed down to Hungary in June for repeatedly ignoring EU asylum rules.
At the time, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán described the court’s decision as “outrageous and unacceptable”.
“It seems that illegal migrants are more important to the Brussels bureaucrats than their own European citizens,” he said.
Gulyás’s comments on Thursday would suggest that little has changed regarding Orbán’s opinion on the ECJ’s judgment.
“Brussels wants to force us to let migrants in at all costs,” he said.
He accused the EU of hypocrisy for allegedly adopting the use of so-called “transit zones” in which to detain asylum seekers. “Hungary has been condemned for the same practice and is being fined heavily,” the minister said.
He also said that the protection of the external Schengen borders is an issue for Europe as a whole, not just Hungary, and that Budapest does not receive any additional resources to protect the border.
Hungary shares a frontier with Serbia and Ukraine, two non-EU and non-Schengen members, and the Hungarian government is looking into legal channels that might force the European Commission to shore up some of the costs of securing the border.
The asylum dispute between Hungary and the EU dates back to December 2020, when the ECJ first ruled that Hungary’s limited access to asylum procedures for those seeking international protection in the country made it “virtually impossible” to file applications.
The court chastised Hungary for unlawfully keeping asylum seekers in “transit zones” under conditions that amounted to detention and violating their right to appeal.
Hungary’s dismissal of the ECJ’s 2020 ruling led the court to hand down its eye-watering fine two months ago. The judges said that Hungary was “disregarding the principle of sincere cooperation” and “deliberately evading” the application of the EU’s asylum legislation.
The penalty also included a daily €1 million fine for each day of delay in bringing Hungary into line with EU law.
