State Secretary: Migration and deteriorating public safety are connected

After a meeting of the Joint Parliamentary Scrutiny Group (JPSG) in Brussels, State Secretary Bence Rétvári said Europeans often see what their politicians do not see, namely that migration and deteriorating public safety are connected.

Rétvári spoke to Hungarian journalists late on Tuesday after a European parliamentary meeting held with the participation of Europol and CEPOL, the EU agency for law enforcement training, organised within the framework of Hungary’s presidency of the European Council.

The meeting focused on the effect of illegal migration on public safety, Rétvári said.

The only way to effectively stop illegal migration, he said, was to protect the external borders, adding that Hungary continues to call on the EU to compensate the country for the 2 billion euros it had spent on doing so. Hungary firmly rejects attempts to penalise the country for those measures, he added.

Rétvári said the Court of Justice of the European Union had acted “unlawfully” by imposing a “gigantic” 200 million euro fine on Hungary, and an additional one million euros for every day the payments are delayed.

He slammed the opposition Tisza party for promoting a position that undermined Hungarian interests when they urged compliance with the EU migration pact.

The number of national lawmakers joining Hungary’s standpoint hopefully would grow, he said, “so we can break down the forced organisation of illegal migration”.

Lajos Kosa, the head of parliament’s defence and law enforcement committee, said recent attacks on Jewish football fans in Amsterdam had shown that Hungary was right on the connection between migration and worsening public safety.

Should the US tighten its migration policy, Europe would have to react, Kosa said, adding that stopping migration required a complex response, starting with the strict policing of the external borders.

Imre Vejkey, the head of parliament’s judiciary committee, lamented that the EP’s Committee for Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE) had prevented the Hungarian presidency from playing a short video on the situation on the Hungarian-Serbian border. “Contrary to many false claims, Hungary does not ‘hate’ migrants but strives for order on the issue of illegal migration,” he said.