Posted by 
Hungary’s government says it’s ready to give every migrant trying to enter the country a one-way ticket to Brussels if a top EU court ruling forces Budapest to adopt a “no-detention” refugee policy.
“After the asylum procedure, we will offer all migrants at the Hungarian border the opportunity to be transported to Brussels voluntarily and free of charge,” said Gergely Gulyás, a minister in Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s office, at the government’s weekly briefing Thursday. “If Brussels wants migrants, it can have them.”
Gulyás added that asylum-seekers “can then negotiate there with the European Commission about their own care.”
The minister outlined the idea in response to a €200 million fine issued against Hungary in June after the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled Budapest was ignoring EU asylum laws as well as an earlier judgment against it.
Hungary, ruled for years by Orbán’s right-wing Fidesz party, has long taken a hard line on asylum-seekers entering the country.
The Luxembourg court ruled in 2020 that Budapest failed to comply with the EU’s rules on the treatment of migrants by “unlawfully detaining” asylum-seekers and deporting them before they could appeal the rejection of their applications.
The court ordered Hungary to change its policies, but Orbán’s government ignored the directive, a response the ECJ slammed in its June ruling as an “unprecedented and exceptionally serious breach of EU law.”
In addition to the €200 million fine, Hungary must pay an additional €1 million for each day it fails to comply with the court’s ruling.
Budapest is now examining whether it can recover some of these costs from the European Commission by filing a lawsuit.
Gulyás said that if Hungary can’t come to a reasonable agreement with the Commission to remedy the “unacceptable, intolerable and unfair” situation created by the ECJ ruling, it will consider taking the unorthodox step of letting all asylum-seekers into the country and offering them a one-way ticket to Brussels.
That proposal comes from the playbook of the Republican Party in the U.S., a regular source of inspiration for the Hungarian government.
In 2022, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican, made a similar move with asylum-seekers at the U.S. border, putting some 50 migrants on a flight to chic, liberal Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts. DeSantis said he had arranged the flights to expose “liberal hypocrisy.”
Other Republican leaders such as Texas Governor Greg Abbott and former Arizona Governor Doug Ducey have sent buses of refugees to Democrat-voting U.S. cities.
