© Laszlo Balogh / Reuters
Hungary has said it will withdraw from a new UN migration pact before its final approval and called the agreement a “threat to the world.”
The Global Compact For Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration was approved by every UN member nation except the United States, which withdrew from the agreement last year.
Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said the pact goes “entirely against Hungary’s security interests” and that it posed a threat to the world because it “could inspire millions” of migrants. He said the agreement was “extreme, biased and facilitates migration.”
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Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has taken a hard line against immigration, which has caused a rift between Budapest and Brussels. At the height of the refugee crisis in 2015, Hungary accused the EU of being “too slow to act” and began constructing razor-wire fences along its border with Serbia. It later said that decision had led to an almost 100 percent drop in illegal immigration.
Szijjarto said the premise of the UN migration pact was that migration is “a good and inevitable phenomenon” but that Hungary considers migration “a bad process, which has extremely serious security implications.”
He also complained that Hungary’s proposals had been ignored during discussions about the document, which he claimed favored nations in Africa and Latin America where migrants often travel from.
Poland, the Czech Republic and Austria have taken similar stances on migration, saying that the mainly Muslim refugees could not assimilate into their mostly Christian societies. Last year, the EU launched legal cases against Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic for their refusal to “take the necessary action” in helping to deal with the refugee crisis.