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Hungary imposes strict new border controls in crackdown on refugees Hungary imposes strict new border controls in crackdown on refugees
(about 1 hour later)
Hungary has implemented draconian border controls, criminalising people who cross the border from Serbia without permission or damage the newly built border fence. One of the main routes used by refugees to reach the safety of the European Union clanged shut early on Tuesday morning, when Hungary formally closed its border, finished fortifying a long-promised border fence, and blocked off a pathway that has brought over 160,000 people into northern Europe since the start of the year.
Hundreds of migrants and refugees spent the night in the open at the border, their passage to western Europe stalled by the Hungarian crackdown. Shortly after midnight, about 100 people, mostly from Syria and Afghanistan, were turned back from the legal land crossing in Horgos, on the border between Serbia and Hungary. Earlier in the day, police had wheeled a train carriage across a set of nearby disused railway tracks, which for weeks had been left open to allow refugees to walk unhindered into the EU.
Aid workers brought tents, food and water for about 500 migrants, many of them Syrian refugees, denied entry overnight under a strict new border regime that Hungary has warned will lead to many asylum seekers being expelled and returned to Serbia. Hungarian police said they detained 16 people claiming to be Syrian and Afghan migrants early on Tuesday for illegally crossing the Serbian border fence. A spokeswoman said the migrants were suspected of lifting the razor wire fence to get into Hungary,
As ministers of the EU’s 28 member states argued over how to share out responsibility for some of the hundreds of thousands who have sought asylum in Europe this year, Hungary moved on Monday to close down the main land route into the bloc along railway tracks from Serbia. The hardline Hungarian government hopes the two moves mark the symbolic conclusion of a months-long attempt to seal its border to an unprecedented wave of refugees who began to make their way through the country in the spring, and whose numbers have risen sharply in recent weeks.
“We will start a new era,” government spokesman Zoltán Kovács said shortly after midnight. “We will stop the inflow of illegal migrants over our green borders.” More than 9,000 refugees made it into Hungary in the final hours before the border was sealed, officials said in a statement, but a substantially greater number of people – still making their way through Syria, Turkey, Greece and the Balkan states – have now been left in limbo.
Police have recorded more than 190,000 refugees entering Hungary this year, including a record for one day of more than 9,000 on Monday. Related: Refugee crisis: Hungary launches border crackdown – live updates
Their window of opportunity is rapidly shrinking as Hungary puts the finishing touches to the fence the length of its 108-mile (175km) southern border. One of the first families to be shut out was a Palestinian-Syrian family from the Damascus suburb of Yarmouk. Carrying two babies all the way from Syria, they have been forced to find a new home just a few decades after their parents’ generation fled from Israel. Radwan, a 38-year-old printer and the father of the family, said: “We’re Palestinian-Syrians, where else are we supposed to go now? We’re coming from destruction and killing. I shouldn’t have to take five children all the way here for us to be shut out here.”
On Monday, a cargo wagon, one end covered in razor wire, was shunted into position to close the main informal crossing point for migrants. Helmeted police and soldiers stood guard and a helicopter circled overhead. But his wife Mayada warned of the futility of trying to stop people fleeing from a fate far worse. “This won’t stop people,” she said, cradling her months-old baby on the road next to the border gates. “For example, my sister and her husband and their three children will leave Syria soon. I have told them that it is difficult, but they will still come.”
The government says refugees will still be able to claim asylum at two official border crossings into Hungary, but if they have entered from Serbia – and not already sought asylum there – they face automatic expulsion within eight days after Budapest in July declared its impoverished southern neighbour “safe” for refugees. For now, those at the border have promised to wait until they are let through, but smugglers say they are already plotting other routes. A car-smuggler in Belgrade suggested going through Croatia, via the town of Sid, while two smugglers who had just dropped people on the Hungarian border said they already had alternatives. “We have other ways,” said one. “This was the easiest, but we have other ones.”
The United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR, says it disputes the designation of Serbia, not an EU member, as a so-called “safe third country”, which would imply refugees have a fair chance of being granted asylum and will receive all the necessary protections and support. On Monday, EU interior ministers agreed on plans aimed at denying the right of asylum to innumerable refugees by funding and building camps for them in Africa and elsewhere outside the EU.
Rights groups say Serbia meets none of the criteria and is still finding homes for thousands of its own refugees from the collapse of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, the last time Europe confronted displacement of people on such a scale. Under plans endorsed in Brussels, ministers agreed that once the proposed system of refugee camps outside the EU was up and running, asylum claims from people in the camps would be inadmissible in Europe.
Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, one of Europe’s most vociferous opponents of mass immigration, said he expected a high rate of deportations. “In such a case, if someone is a refugee, we will ask them whether they have submitted an asylum request in Serbia. If they had not done so, given that Serbia is a safe country, they will be rejected,” he was quoted as telling private broadcaster TV2. The emergency meeting of EU interior ministers was called to grapple with Europe’s worst modern refugee crisis. It broke up in acrimony amid failure to agree on a new system of binding quotas for refugees being shared across the EU and other decisions being deferred until next month.
An official of Orbán’s Fidesz party said authorities would rule on such asylum requests within eight days. The lacklustre response to a refugee emergency that is turning into a full-blown European crisis focused on “Fortress Europe” policies aimed at excluding refugees and shifting the burden of responsibility on to third countries, either of transit or of origin.
Orbán has vowed zero tolerance on the EU’s external border, framing the crisis as a battle for Europe’s prosperity, identity and “Christian values”. The ministers called for the establishment of refugee camps in Italy and Greece and for the detention of “irregular migrants” denied asylum and facing deportation but for whom “voluntary return” was not “practicable”.
The influx into Europe, by boat from north Africa across the Mediterranean or across Turkey and up the Balkan peninsula, has triggered discord and recrimination in the 28-nation EU, feeding anti-immigration sentiment. The most bruising battle was over whether Europe should adopt a new system of mandatory quotas for sharing refugees. The scheme, proposed by the European commission last week, is strongly supported by Germany, which sought to impose the idea on the mainly eastern European rejectionists.
On Monday, two decades of frontier-free travel across Europe unravelled as Austria and Slovakia followed Germany in re-establishing border controls to cope with the influx. Austria said it would dispatch armed forces to guard its eastern frontier with Hungary. Hungary’s government said it would have no part of the scheme, from which it would benefit, while Thomas de Maizière, the German interior minister, complained that the agenda for the meeting was inadequate.
EU ministers meeting on Monday in Brussels failed to break a deadlock over sharing out responsibility for some of the hundreds of thousands who have sought asylum in Europe this year. The ministers agreed “in principle” to share 160,000 refugees across at least 22 countries, taking them from Greece, Hungary, and Italy, but delayed a formal decision until next month, made plain the scheme should be voluntary rather than binding and demanded ‘flexibility’. De Maizière, by contrast, called for precise definitions of how refugees would be shared.
Migrants were able to enter Hungary until midnight on Monday, in small groups queuing at an official pedestrian border crossing, but there was deep uncertainty over a possible bottleneck on the Serbian side on Tuesday as thousands continued to stream through the Balkans from Greece, having arrived by boat and dinghy from Turkey. Luxembourg, chairing the meeting, signalled that there was a sufficient majority to impose the quotas, but that the meeting had balked at forcing a vote.
Aleksandar Vulin, the Serbian government minister in charge of policy on migrants, said his country would not accept anyone being returned to Serbia having already entered Hungarian territory. The meeting took place as curbs on free movement across Europe snowballed following Germany’s unilateral and controversial decision on Sunday to re-establish national border controls at the centre of Europe’s free-travel Schengen area of 26 countries. Austria and Slovakia followed suit, while the Dutch said they were stepping up border area patrols and the Belgian authorities said they were considering parallel action.
“That’s no longer our responsibility,” he told the Tanjug state news agency. “They are on Hungarian territory and I expect the Hungarian state to behave accordingly towards them.”