“Commuting will once again be possible along the Romanian-Hungarian border for people who work on the other side of the border”, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Péter Szijjártó said in a statement to Hungarian news agency MTI on Wednesday.

“Similarly to several other European countries, Hungary and Romania have introduced restrictions on crossing their borders”, the Minister reminded the press. “These measures are absolutely legitimate and are aimed at protecting the people of Hungary and Romania from the spread of the coronavirus pandemic”, he explained.

“However, the lives of the communities living along the border between the two countries are closely intertwined, with many crossing the border daily to work, and in addition to protecting people’s health it is also our duty to protect the functioning of the economy as much as possible”, he stated.

“For this reason, we have decided, similarly to Hungarian-Austrian and Hungarian-Slovakian cooperation, to also establish a procedure with Romania to enable people to commute across the Hungarian-Romanian border for the purposes of work”, Mr. Szijjártó stressed. The Minister said that in his opinion this serves the interests of Hungarians living across the border, and is in the interests of Hungarian and Romanian enterprises and the economy.

The Minister said the countries’ two chiefs of police will be coming to an agreement at the earliest opportunity concerning when the agreement will be implemented and with relation to which border crossing points it will be valid, explaining that he and his Romanian counterpart had agreed that communiting will once again be possible within a 30-kilometre zone along the Romanian-Hungarian border for people who work on the other side of the border.

(MTI)