The head of the Prime Minister’s Office has revealed that Hungary’s fight with the European Union for sovereignty in the area of migration is underway.
“What we have done over the past few years when it comes to migration was fight for sovereignty,” Gergely Gulyás told a conference on Thursday. Whereas Hungary refrained from dictating to others how to decide on the issue, “we insisted that no one should question our freedom … to decide on migration,” he added.
The minister highlighted that the key debate at a European level in the coming years would revolve around the bloc’s powers “versus state sovereignty”. He said what falls into the category of the bloc’s powers and those of the state was not “black and white”.
Gulyás added that the most important issue in the migration debate over the past few years was what may be determined as a national competence as opposed to a community one. He said the Lisbon Treaty contained, in most cases, reasonable compromises in terms of the division of powers, and wherever there were related disputes in recent years, Hungary had almost every time won the argument.
The minister noted that the European Court of Justice had ruled that migrant distribution quotas should be implemented only in light of the extraordinary situation and on a temporary basis. Generally, the court shared Hungary’s view that neither the European Commission nor any other European organization possessed such distributive powers.