The X account of the news website Remix News, boasting around 20,000 followers, has posted a clip of Interior Ministry State Secretary (Deputy Interior Minister) Bence Rétvári of Hungary discussing the fine imposed by the European Court of Justice on his country. English subtitles were provided for the clip for an international audience.
In June, the ECJ fined the Hungarian government €200 million for ‘failing to comply with the 2020 judgment as regards the right of applicants for international protection to remain in Hungary pending a final decision on their appeal against the rejection of their application and the removal of illegally staying third-country nationals’. In other words, for not letting migrants remain in the country after they were ordered to leave or be deported, while their appeal process is pending.
State Secretary Rétvári, in the footage shared on the social media platform X of his appearance on the Hungarian cable news channel Hír TV, had this to say about the ECJ fine:
‘They are punishing Hungary because we are defending the [European Union’s] external border. We are being punished because the Hungarian border hunters and the Hungarian police are telling the people arriving without any paperwork to stop, turn around…Brussels would expect the same border patrol agents not to say that…but to help them fill out the documents and help them, as they put it, “exercise their migrant rights”.
We’ve been told that the Hungarian procedure is not humanitarian enough because
they believe the duty of the police and the border patrol is not to defend the border, but to help people exercise their migrant rights.
We find this unacceptable. The amount of the fine is a European record, they don’t impose fines like this in Brussels, the European Court of Justice does not hand out fines like that.’
He went on to call the judgement ‘obvious political pressure’ to coerce Hungary into letting masses of illegal migrants into the country and to support Brussels’ policies regarding the Russo–Ukrainian War.
However, Rétvári vowed that no matter the fine, Hungary would not give in to the pressure, and would not let mass illegal migration ruin the country. He cited the recent riots in the United Kingdom as an example of what kind of circumstances that could lead to.
The tweet cited above has received around 1,000 likes in the first ten hours of it being posted; as well as 24 comments and 417 retweets. The comments are overwhelmingly supportive of Rétvári’s message. One user wrote: ‘Nobody normal who has seen what is happening to [the] UK would want the same things happening to their country, except communists, criminals and left wing mental patients.’
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