Hundreds of asylum seekers were preparing to bed down at Serbia's border with Hungary on Tuesday night, after the Budapest government sealed the frontier and introduced a partial state of emergency and swingeing legal crackdown on migrants.
Hungary moved to stem a flow of refugees and migrants that has seen 200,000 people cross the country this year, as a common stance on the crisis continued to elude the European Union and member states took security matters into their own hands.
Austria intends today to reintroduce controls on its borders with Hungary, Slovenia, Slovakia and Italy, just as Germany has done on its frontier with Austria, and Slovakia on its borders with Hungary and Austria; Hungary also plans to extend its fence to block part of its border with Romania.
Huge backlog
Non-EU nations
Serbia
and
Macedonia
– further south on the route migrants take from
Turkey
to Hungary – fear they will have to cope with a huge backlog of people who are unable to enter Hungary, just as autumn closes in.
After workers completed a fence along its border with Serbia late on Monday, Hungary introduced a swathe of deeply controversial laws that prime minister Viktor Orban says mark the start of a "new era" for his country's security.
The tough laws make it a criminal offence, punishable with several years in prison, to cross Hungary’s border without permission or to damage the 175km, four-metre-high fence along the Serbian frontier. The state of emergency declared in two counties bordering Serbia, meanwhile, gives sweeping powers to the police.
Mr Orban wants arriving migrants to be kept in “transit zones” on the border, where asylum requests would be processed within hours and most – if not all – would be rejected, on the grounds that the applicant is arriving from Serbia, which Hungary deems to be safe for refugees.
People arrested for allegedly entering Hungary illegally or damaging border infrastructure will be tried in “fast-track” courts being established in a city near the Serbian frontier and those convicted will be sent back to Serbia.
“The people in the transit zones are legally speaking not in Hungarian territory, similar to transit zones in an airport . . . [they] are in operation, completely conforming with Hungarian and international law,” Hungarian government spokesman Zoltan Kovacs said on Tuesday.
Alongside him, Mr Orban’s adviser Gyorgy Bakondi added: “Today, 60 people have been caught by police cutting or damaging the fence, 45 at the border, the other 15 further inside the country. Police have launched criminal procedures against them.” By evening, a total of 174 migrants had been arrested under the laws.
“The message we want to send is, ‘Don’t come, this route will not take you to your destination’,” Mr Bakondi said.
Migration experts warn that Hungary’s measures will not deter asylum seekers or people smugglers, but only force desperate people to pay more to smugglers and to take riskier routes.
In response to predictions that migrants would quickly find new paths towards western Europe, Hungary's foreign minster Peter Szijjarto said the barrier would be extended to also block part of the country's border with Romania.
The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) warned Hungary that it had “obligations to follow which it looks like this new legislation would be a contravention of”.
Magdalena Majkowska-Tomkin, the head of the Hungary office of the IOM, questioned the country’s adherence to “the international UN conventions on the status of refugees, but also EU legislation regarding asylum and also regarding criminal procedures”.
“From my perspective, Hungary needs to respect its international obligations and allow people to claim asylum and provide facilities for them that are adequate for their condition,” she told Reuters.
After EU interior ministers failed on Monday to agree on how to share responsibility for refugees between all member states, German chancellor Angela Merkel called for a special EU summit on the crisis to be held next week.
As rancour over how to handle the crisis opens rifts between EU states, Hungary’s crackdown on migrants is causing deep anxiety in Serbia, which fears tens of thousands of people could be stuck there if the border remains effectively closed.
Cash-strapped country
Serbian foreign minister
Ivica Dacic
said it would be “unacceptable” for Hungary to send large numbers of asylum seekers back to his cash-strapped country.
Serbian minister for social affairs Aleksandar Vulin visited the border with Hungary on Tuesday and said his country had not been warned of its sudden closure.
“This is not only a Hungarian and Serbia problem. This is a problem for the whole of Europe. Europe has to find a solution fast before the situation escalates even further,” Mr Vulin said.
“This border crossing, one of the main ones in Europe, has to remain open . . . I call on Hungary to open its border for the migrants – at least for women and children.”
