Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said his request to migrants not to come to Europe through Hungary was “for moral reasons” because he could not take responsibility for what might happen to them along the way.

Addressing a meeting of Hungary’s foreign mission leaders yesterday morning, Mr. Orbán said that people who had already made it to Turkey, Greece, Macedonia, Serbia, Hungary and Austria are already safe, so they are not running for safety. They have actually “set their eyes on life in Germany”, he added. The Prime Minister said that in 90 per cent of European Union member states, the opinion of the people and “political elite” are diverged. In Hungary, however, points of agreement have been formed between the people and the government thanks to national consultations, which anchor government operations in a democratic way, he said, adding thereby the government is sticking to its asylum policy. “A country without borders is not a country,” he told the envoys. And this is also true if those borders are unprotected, he added. The EU was right to make borders between member states fade into insignificance, but Hungary also has external borders to protect, under a legal obligation in the Schengen Agreement, the prime minister noted. Hungary has built a barrier in order to keep to Schengen rules, and while there is no guarantee that this will suffice, it must try all it can to protect the external borders, he said.

In his over one-hour speech, delivered in the building of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Prime Minister stressed that Hungary does not represent an “anti-Islamic” stance and seeks to avoid the deterioration of its relations with states adhering to Islamic civilisation – highlighting that both Turkey and the Gulf states are friends of Hungary and the cabinet is willing to find a “common voice” also with Iran.

He also made it clear that the government looks upon Hungary’s Muslim community, whose members live in the country legally, as a “value”. “Hungary respects the Muslim community living here but does not wants its share in the population to grow suddenly and radically due to external influences”, he said. Hungary will reject the demands of those calling for changes in the country’s cultural and ethnic composition, he said.

via hungarymatters.hu and MTI

photo: Szilárd Koszticsák/MTI