By Anita Komuves and Robin Emmott
BUDAPEST/BRUSSELS (Reuters) – Hungary cannot approve a new European Union trade and development accord with African, Caribbean and Pacific countries because it would bring more migrants into the bloc, the country’s foreign minister said on Thursday.
Budapest’s refusal to ratify the accord with 79 countries, which was agreed by EU negotiators in December, would imperil years of talks to update the two-decade-old Cotonou development treaty with new provisions on areas including climate protection, human rights and migration.
The pledge to block the treaty is Budapest’s latest step in holding up EU policies ranging from China to Lebanon. On Tuesday, Hungary declined to support an EU call for a ceasefire in violence between Israel and the Palestinians.
“All of our proposals have been swept off the table, so we will surely not give our names to this agreement,” Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said of the Post-Cotonou deal.
“There is no need for fresh migration waves, especially now,” he told reporters in Brussels, referring to the impact of COVID-19, according to a news conference posted on his Facebook page.
The new treaty, called Post-Cotonou, must be ratified by all 27 EU states to take effect and, along with trade and aid, it includes ways for African, Caribbean and Pacific nations to take back migrants whose asylum applications have failed in the EU.
But Hungary’s nationalist prime minister Viktor Orban, who rejects EU efforts to share out refugees across the bloc, has objected to some of the terms of the Post-Cotonou agreement, which aims to help the mostly former colonies of EU nations.
The treaty would allow for some legal migration for African, Caribbean and Pacific citizens to the EU through visas and family reunification, for instance.
Orban told Reuters in an interview in September that Hungary did not want “a parallel society, or open society or a mixed-up culture,” that included Muslim migrants from non-EU countries.
(Reporting by Robin Emmott in Brussels and Anita Komuves in Budapest; Editing by Hugh Lawson)
