"As the number of illegal border crossings continues to skyrocket — reaching nearly 72,000 already this year — Hungary is taking additional measures to address the challenge, introducing new laws that will help identify more quickly the genuine asylum seekers who deserve protection and manage more effectively those who are attempting to immigrate illegally.
Last month’s EU summit offered some progress. It softened up on the quota system on member states, giving Hungary and Bulgaria special exemptions, but more importantly it affirmed that extraordinary circumstances — like this huge increase in illegal immigration — sometimes require extraordinary measures, and individual member states should be free to act as appropriate. Afterall, Hungary’s borders are also the EU’s borders.
New legislation introduced in parliament earlier this week aims to do just that. The bill attempts to crack down on those who try to exploit the asylum rules to immigrate illegally. It speeds up and makes more cost-effective the procedure for investigating the identity of asylum seekers and, importantly, allows authorities to detain asylum seekers until court proceedings on their cases are completed. That was something we could not do under the EU rules, which made it easy for those crossing the border illegally to simply claim asylum and then disappear, often moving on to another EU country.