Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán announced that his government will not comply with the EU Migration and Asylum Pact and does not intend to accept migrants under relocation schemes. “As long as there is a patriotic government in Hungary, we will not implement the migration pact. We will not accept migrants and will not spend a cent on them,” Orbán wrote on Twitter on Wednesday.
The statement came amid the European Commission’s initiative to relocate asylum seekers from the countries under the most pressure — Spain, Italy, Greece, and Cyprus — to other EU states.
A number of countries, including Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia, have opposed participation in this scheme.
Orbán has repeatedly criticized pan-European mechanisms for distributing migrants and threatened to sue the European Commission if mandatory resettlement quotas are imposed.