Hungary shuts off migrants’ route
HUNGARY’S rightwing government shut the main land route for migrants into the EU yesterday, taking matters into its own hands to halt Europe’s unprecedented influx of refugees while the bloc failed to agree on a plan to distribute them.
Crowds of migrants built up at Serbia’s northern border with Hungary, their passage blocked by a razor wire fence.
Under new rules that took effect from midnight, Hungary says anyone seeking asylum at the Serbian border will automatically be turned back. Anyone trying to sneak through will face jail.
Prime Minister Viktor Orban, one of the continent’s loudest opponents of mass immigration, says he is acting to save Europe’s “Christian values” by blocking the main overland route used by mainly Muslim refugees, through the Balkans and across his country via its border with Serbia.
In scenes with echoes of the Cold War, families with small children sat in fields beneath the former communist country’s new 3.5m high fence, which runs almost the length of the border.
Hundreds of thousands of people have been arriving at the EU’s southern and eastern edges and making their way to the richer countries further north and west, in the greatest migration to western Europe since World War II.
With emergency talks having failed to break a deadlock over an EU plan to force member countries to accept quotas of refugees, Germany’s interior minister said the bloc should consider imposing financial penalties on countries that refused.
Record arrivals forced Germany and several neighbours to reimpose emergency frontier controls this week, unravelling two decades of borderless travel in the 26-member Schengen zone, one of the EU’s flagship achievements.
Obligation
Germany and other relatively open countries say Europe has a moral obligation to accept refugees and other EU states must play their part.
East European countries in particular argue that a more welcoming stance only encourages more people to make dangerous voyages, and risks attracting an uncontrolled influx of millions.
Under its new rules, Hungary said it would now automatically turn back refugees who arrived by land at its border with Serbia, which it has declared “safe”, meaning those crossing from it cannot claim asylum.
Asylum claims would be processed within eight days, and those at the Serbian border should be rejected within hours.
“If someone is a refugee, we will ask them whether they have submitted an asylum request in Serbia.
If they had not done so, given that Serbia is a safe country, they will be rejected,” Orban was quoted as saying.
“We will start a new era,” government spokesman Zoltan Kovacs said soon after midnight on the border.
“We will stop the inflow of illegal migrants over our green borders.” Long queues formed in no man’s land at metal containers built into the fence, where migrants were expected to register, although only a handful were seen entering. – Reuters