“In view of the increasing number of terrorist attacks in Western Europe, Hungarian law enforcement authorities must also identify, and if needed weed out, suspected terrorists living in the European Union”, the Ministry of Justice’s Parliamentary State Secretary and Deputy Minister Pál Völner said in an interview for Hungarian daily Magyar Idők (Hungarian Times).

In an interview published in the 29 August 2017 edition of the paper, the Deputy Minister explained that according to news reports the perpetrators of the attacks included people who have been living in Western Europe for some time, and in fact some of them were EU citizens. “This means that Hungarian counter-terrorism agencies must not only monitor people arriving from the east and south, but also people in the west”, he added.

According to Mr. Völner, the relationship between migration and terrorism must by now have become obvious even to those who were previously doing everything in their power to deny the link.

“The Hungarian Government has been saying that migration is a danger to EU security for two or three years now, and that this is one of the prime reasons why we cannot accept the mandatory resettlement quota”, the Parliamentary State Secretary said. The European Court of Justice will be issuing its ruling on the quota case next week, with relating to which Mr. Völner said: “We can only hope that the Luxembourg court will come to a decision based on legal arguments and the brutal experiences of reality, and not based on political pressure, and that it does not attempt to force European states that reject illegal migration into a dangerous situation”.

(Cabinet Office of the Prime Minister/MTI)