The European Commission has threatened to take away European Union funds from Hungary if it does not pay the €200 million fine imposed by the European Court of Justice over the country’s asylum system.
“There is no wiggle room here. We have to follow the applicable procedures,” a Commission spokesman said on Monday, September 2nd.
The issue revolves around the Hungarian conservative government’s tough stance on migration. Hungary has made it difficult for illegal migrants to enter the country, which is also the external border of the European Union—a border Hungary is obliged to protect.
Since 2016, Hungary has been enabling its police to deport foreigners lacking valid documentation directly to Serbia. Illegal migrants travelling through the Western Balkan route can only submit requests for asylum outside Hungary’s borders.
The European Commission, which has been pursuing an open-border, pro-migration policy, has deemed these practices a breach of EU law, saying asylum seekers should be allowed into a member state to seek protection and to stay there until their claim is handled.
In its verdict in June, the European Court of Justice ordered Hungary to pay a fine of €200 million for persistently breaking the bloc’s asylum rules, plus an additional €1 million for every day it fails to comply—in effect punishing Hungary for protecting its own and the EU’s borders.
If Hungary refuses to pay, the money will be automatically subtracted from the country’s allocated share of the EU budget. This was reiterated by a Commission spokesman on Monday who said Hungary has missed the first deadline to pay the €200 million fine. Brussels will send a second payment request, with a new deadline of September 17th.
The demand by Brussels is outrageous and cynical, given the fact that it owes Hungary €22 billion in EU funds which it has frozen due to so-called rule-of-law violations. The Budapest Government is actually being punished for its tough stance on migration, its refusal to send weapons to Ukraine, its anti-globalist, sovereigntist approach, and its rejection of gender ideology.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s chief of staff Gergely Gulyás recently said that if the EU continues to impose a form of regulation on Hungary that “does not make it possible to detain migrants at the border,” his country will offer every migrant “transport to Brussels free of charge.”
In the meantime, Hungary is also taking legal steps to ensure that Brussels pays up the €2 billion it owes to Budapest for defending the EU’s external borders. According to Bence Rétvári, the interior ministry’s state secretary:
The EU has not made a substantial contribution to the costs of border protection, and has not shown solidarity with Hungary, which protects its borders.
Reacting to the European Commission’s latest threat against Hungary, Bence Rétvári said on Tuesday in a post on Facebook:
We have been pursuing the same policy since 2015: borders must be protected, nobody can come through illegally at the green border without documents.
