Barna Pál Zsigmond, state secretary of the Ministry of EU Affairs, said that despite "Brussels' blackmailing and threats", Hungary rejects the European Union's migration pact because it goes against national interests.
At a joint press conference held with György Bakondi, the prime minister's chief advisor for domestic security, on Monday, Zsigmond said the pact that Brussels tries to force on Hungary was not suitable for handling migration because, instead of prevention, it encouraged migration. Despite this, the European Commission is still pouring money, just now another 3 billion euros, into a system that is inoperable, and the Court of Justice of the European Union and European Court of Human Rights are also pro-migration, he added.
At the same time, the Hungarian model, which involves the protection of external borders, an effective system of expulsion, taking action against human smugglers and assessing asylum requests outside the EU works, and an increasing number of countries take over certain elements of it, he said.
EU institutions use double standards against Hungary because while they criticise Hungary for building a border fence and refuse to refund the 2 billion euros spent on border protection, they support Poland building a border fence on the east, he added. Zsigmond said the reason was that whereas Poland had a left-wing government, Hungary had a right-wing one.
Bakondi said that the pressure of migration was increasing on the Serbian-Hungarian border, with 5,931 instances of illegal border crossing attempts prevented this year already, as against 1,224 in the same period of last year. Migrants are increasingly violent, and fights have become regular between the various human smuggling rings, sometimes resulting in deaths.