State Secretary Bence Rétvári said Hungary has successfully demonstrated how to protect the border.
The European Union’s external land borders span 440km, while its internal borders add up to 7,500km, Rétvári noted in connection with a meeting of the EU’s Justice and Home Affairs Council, where he played a video of the attacks Hungarian police officers have had to endure from armed illegal migrants on the southern border. “It’s obvious that the shorter section must be protected against illegal migration,” he said, adding that Hungary’s border protection worked but would only be effective in protecting the whole of Europe if it could not be bypassed. “This is what should be done on the Bulgarian and Greek borders, too,” he said, adding that there had been attempts to talk the Hungarian delegation out of playing the video, but once the video was played, it was met with “stunned silence”. Many at the meeting, he said, had snapped photos of the scenes in the video or asked for a copy. “The reason why they were stunned by the video was because in their mind the job of border guards isn’t to protect the border but to help illegal migrants submit their asylum applications,” Rétvári said. He said Western European media did not report on what is happening on Hungary’s southern border, “and whatever isn’t covered in the papers doesn’t exist to decision-makers, either”. The state secretary said Brussels was working on adding exceptions to the EU’s planned migration directive that provide a basis for taking in migrants. He added that Hungary was hopeful the central European member states could reach an agreement on the need to protect the bloc’s external border in the region.