The European Union should either temporarily suspend or permanently kick out Hungary over its treatment of refugees, Luxembourg’s Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn has said.
“We cannot accept that the basic values of the European Union are being so seriously breached,” Asselborn told the Germany daily news publication Die Welt. “Anyone, like Hungary, who builds fences against war refugees or breaches press freedom and the independence of the justice system should be temporarily, or if needed forever, excluded from the EU.”
Anyone, like Hungary, who builds fences against war refugees or breaches press freedom and the independence of the justice system should be temporarily, or if needed forever, excluded from the EU.
Asselborn said that refugees were being treated “worse than wild animals” in Hungary and that migrants were far from being shot in the country. He also suggested that the expulsion of Hungary would be “the only way of preserving the cohesion and values of the European Union.”
“This was not a position that was agreed upon by European states,” German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier told reporters in response to Asselborn’s comments, according to the Agence France Presse.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has harshly opposed the European Union’s plan to distribute migrants coming into the bloc under a mandatory quota system over two years. Hungary had been the main point of entry for migrants traveling by land “into the EU’s border-free Schengen zone for migrants traveling by land until Orban shut the Croatian and Serbian frontier,” Reuters reported, referencing the so-called Balkan route.
As part of his anti-migration campaign, Orban’s government has erected razor wires spooled over fences along its southern border to stop migrants, refugees, and asylum-seekers. He has also doubled the number of policemen on its southern border with Serbia, up to anywhere between 6,000 and 10,000. The prime minister has also called migrants “poison,” adding that “whoever needs migrants can take them, but don’t force them on us, we don’t need them.”
The country will hold a controversial referendum next month to decide whether to accept future E.U. mandatory resettlement quotas. The government has put out an aggressive anti-migration campaign, releasing booklets and asking citizens to vote no on the vote on October 2.
More gov't sponsored xenophobic anti-refugee propaganda rubbish in #Hungary: https://t.co/D9oEHDi2UK pic.twitter.com/5qYoKxd9ZJ
— Lydia Gall (@LydsG) September 9, 2016
Hungary set up a transit zone last year, a “legal fiction claiming that persons in the zone have not yet ‘entered’” the country, according to Human Rights Watch, an international advocacy group. In this no-man’s land, Hungarian officials allegedly force back migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers to Serbia using heavy-handed tactics and “viciously” beat women and children, the organization said in a report released in July.
Hungary also became emblematic of the anti-immigrant sentiment fomenting in the country last September after a camerawoman kicked a refugee carrying a young boy as he ran from police and tripped a young girl. She has since been fired from her job and was recently indicted.
Asselborn’s comments come three days before a highly-anticipated, “informal” summit in Bratislava where government leaders plan to discuss a post-Brexit roadmap for the EU’s future. On the agenda are issues like security and free movement of immigrants, including that undertaken by migrants and refugees who have crossed the Mediterranean Sea seeking shelter in the European Union.
The E.U. migration crisis has seen hundreds of thousands of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers on a desperate run by land and over the Mediterranean Sea over the past several years. Many are fleeing from violence and persecution in Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq as well as other African countries.
Asselborn’s comments put a harsh spotlight on Hungary to step up its responsibilities, but tensions have also boiled over for other E.U. members like Italy, France, and Germany, which have been the largest recipients of migrants. Advocates have accused Italian officials of “quietly” deporting asylum seekers depending on their country of origin, without letting them have a chance to request asylum as required by international law. Local officials have dismantled 26 makeshift camps across France, and officials sometimes mock refugees while preventing them from retrieving their belongings. And German authorities often fail to investigate and prosecute violence against refugees, the humanitarian group Amnesty International found in a June report.