A senior government official said Wednesday that Hungary will reject the EU’s migration solidarity mechanism and will not accept any migrants, according to Hungarian media.
Gergely Gulyas, head of Hungary's Prime Minister's Office, made the remarks at a press conference in Budapest, reiterating the right-wing government's long-standing opposition to EU migration policies.
On Monday, EU interior and justice ministers reached an agreement on the so-called solidarity mechanism, which includes a system for distributing migrants among EU member states.
Under the plan, countries unwilling to take in refugees may instead provide financial contributions or material support. The pact is expected to go into effect in June 2026.
"We will not implement the migration pact," Gulyas said. He added that the EU "has no authority to decide with whom Hungarians should live," and pointed to a 2016 referendum in which voters rejected what the government described as the EU's forced resettlement of migrants.
The referendum took place a year after the peak of the 2015 refugee crisis, during which Hungary erected barbed-wire fences along its borders with Serbia and Croatia to block migration along the Balkan route.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has been in conflict with the European Commission for years over his restrictive asylum policies.
In 2024, the European Court of Justice fined the country for repeated violations of EU asylum law, imposing a one-off penalty of €200 million ($232 million) and a daily fine of €1 million for non-compliance. The court cited a de facto halt to asylum applications and the unlawful detention of asylum seekers as key violations.
