Péter Szijjártó, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade, said Brussels should be financing the enhancement of the coast guards in North Africa instead of “NGOs that cooperate with people smugglers and migrants”.
Speaking in Tunis, after talks with Tunisian President Kais Saied, the foreign minister said Hungary will be taking over the rotating presidency of the European Union in a period fraught with dangers such as the migration pressure faced by the continent. He said that the situation was made worse by Brussels’s “pro-migration policies”, which, he added, were bad for both Europe and North Africa because illegal immigration posed a danger to both transit and destination countries. Minister Szijjártó said that in order to successfully combat migration, the EU must “cut off the funding of NGOs that cooperate with people smugglers and transport migrants”. “Brussels should be financing North Africa’s coast guards instead of these NGOs”. “The many tens or hundreds of millions of euros Brussels spends on supporting NGOs could be used to modernise the coast guards of the North African countries, thereby stopping people smugglers and reducing migration pressure,” he said.
The foreign minister added that Brussels should “end its practice of issuing diktats to the African countries”, and instead bring its relations with those countries back to the grounds of mutual respect. Africa’s population, he said, was on track to grow by an estimated 750 million in the next twenty years, and the continent was in need of significant economic development programmes. But, he warned, if Europe abandoned Africa, it would face “unmanageable humanitarian and security challenges” in the coming years in decades. “We know full well how big a role the north African line of defence plays in Europe’s defence against migration,” Minister Szijjártó said at a visit in Tunis. “And Tunisia plays a prominent role.” “We therefore call on the European Union not to interfere in Tunisia’s domestic political affairs and destabilise Tunisia, but to cooperate with it in the fight against migration under a comprehensive partnership agreement and carry out economic developments,” the minister said.