“Europe hasn’t been subject to such serious security challenges since the Second World War and a unified and determined response must be provided to them”, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Péter Szijjártó said on Friday in Bratislava at Central Europe’s most important foreign and security policy forum, the GLOBSEC 2016 conference.
With relation to illegal immigration and current security challenges, Mr. Szijjártó told Hungarian news agency MTI: It is clear that the European Union has failed with the responses it has provided to handle the immigration crisis because they were based on the idea of the quota, and that has become a total failure, which everyone now clearly recognises.
“It would seem that the European Commission alone wants to maintain this idea and their latest plan is also based on the idea of a quota. We reject this, because the quota is a proposal that is totally at odds with common sense”, Mr Szijjártó stressed. We shouldn’t be thinking about a quota, but about protecting our external borders, because a quota will only make the crisis more serious instead of alleviating it, he added. This is something that we should make absolutely clear to all of Europe via the Visegrád Group’s common sense policies, he added.
Hungary’s chief diplomat is also taking part in seven bilateral meetings within the framework of the forum. In addition to the topics of illegal immigration and establishing energy security, these talks also centre on the upcoming NATO summit in Warsaw.
With relation to the latter, Mr. Szijjártó said: it is very important that the Visegrád Group underpins its solidarity with Europe and accordingly the possibility of the V4 (Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic) sending a joint military force to the Baltic region was also discussed at the meetings relating to the summit. According to plan, the V4 countries would each deploy a company of troops to the region in quarterly shifts.
With regard to negotiations on energy security, Mr. Szijjártó told the press that unilateral energy dependency is present to an even greater extent in Central Europe than it is in Western Europe. The situation is made more serious by the fact that the north-south infrastructure network still hasn’t been realised. One of the components of this is the fact that some of Hungary’s neighbours still haven’t fulfilled their related commitments, and the other is that for the moment the European Commission has been unsuccessful in forcing through the related agreements, Mr. Szijjártó added.
A dozen more bilateral and multilateral meetings will also be taking place on Friday afternoon, the first day of the GLOBSEC conference. The event, which is taking place under extremely high security, is hosting some one thousand guests from 70 countries, including heads of state and government, former and current Prime Ministers and foreign policy, security policy and economic experts. The conference will end on Sunday.
(Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade)
