János Bóka, EU Affairs Minister, said Hungary is fulfilling its commitments to the European Union's legal system while implementing its National Card procedure, and it conducts all the controls specified in the Schengen regulations, especially those related to security, on the third-country citizens applying for residency through the program.
Speaking at the European parliamentary debate on Hungary's National Card program, Bóka said that similarly to other member states, Hungary was offering several types of residence permits to third-country citizens. One of those permit types is the National Card program, he said.
The rights of member states to issue residence and work permits that ease procedural burdens or offer other advantages to the nationals of certain countries was, Bóka said, in itself no violation of EU law. Hungary continues to implement all security checks protecting the Schengen Area and is bound by EU law, he added.
Health and Food Safety Commissioner Stella Kyriakides called Belarus and Russia threats to the security of the European Union. The EU had called on member states to tighten visa regulations and border checks for Russian citizens in view of the "concerning degree of Russian espionage", she said.
Fidesz MEP Andras Laszlo said European countries had issued 687,239 visas to Russian citizens in the year the war started. In 2023, "dozens of weeks after the war started", France issued 99,517 visas to Russians, Spain gave out 92,414, and Greece 54,289. "Do you know how many debates the European Parliament held over that? Zero."
Of the Russian citizens legally in the EU on January 1, 2023, Hungary issued visas to fewer than 1 percent, Laszlo said.
In July and August, Hungary issued a total of 10 permits to Russians within the National Card program, he said.
Mi Hazank MEP Zsuzsanna Borvendeg said Hungary expected others to "respect our independence, laws and customs". Citing security risks when criticising Hungary was "hypocritical as the EU had been allowing millions of illegal migrants in without any control for years", she said.
She called on the EU to pay the 2 billion euros she said the protection of the EU and Hungary's border had cost, and to free up the resources "my country is entitled to".
Csaba Molnar, an MEP of the opposition Democratic Coalition, said that while "the Hungarian prime minister is preaching about border protection, the government is actually opening one back door after the other for those wanting to come to the EU, without any vetting to speak of. This is not about guest workers or migration, this is a severe security risk."
He insisted that Hungary's government had opened the EU's gates to droves of "Russian and Belarusian spies, sleeper agents and war criminals."