Budapest wants reimbursement for money spent on border protection against illegal immigrants, a senior official has said

Hungary could sue the European Commission for compensation of money spent on border protection amid the migrant influx in recent years, the head of Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s office said on Thursday.

Gergely Gulyas insisted to reporters that Budapest would not be forced to accept migrants, adding that those granted political asylum under EU rules would be offered a “free one-way trip to Brussels.” Hungary closed its southern border to asylum seekers in 2015 at the peak of the migration crisis.

“We are ready to sue the European Commission after it had reimbursed partially or in full the costs incurred by other member states protecting the Schengen border,” he said, as quoted by Reuters.

Gulyas was referring to Germany’s decision earlier this month to tighten border controls in an effort to curb the threat of Islamist extremism and tackle irregular migration. The official sounded the alarm about the move, suggesting that “Germany would destroy Schengen” while predicting it would have a serious impact on the EU economy.

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“The government said the same thing ten years ago: ‘If we don’t protect the external borders, the internal borders will be restored. Now we see that the internal, border-free area of Schengen is ending, we are living between borders again, which no one wanted.” 

Gulyas also noted that Hungary had spent €2 billion ($2.2 billion) “on protecting the Schengen border in the past years without getting any meaningful contribution whatsoever from the EU.” 

Hungary has long been at loggerheads with the EU over migration, and has refused to support bloc-wide resettlement quotas. In June, the European Court of Justice fined Budapest €200 million ($220 million) for not following the bloc’s asylum regulation, while slapping it with an additional penalty of €1 million for each day it fails to comply.

Orban has denounced the ruling as “outrageous and unacceptable,” while officials in Budapest have threatened to send buses filled with migrants to Brussels. In response, the EU said it would use “all powers” to stop Hungary from doing so.

The EU has been grappling with a migration crisis since at least 2015, largely caused by upheavals in the Middle East and Africa, and later by the Ukraine conflict. According to the EU Commission, there were 385,445 irregular border crossings in 2023, an 18% increase from 2022.