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Hungary opens border crossing with Serbia for legal traffic

Xinhua, July 31, 2015 Adjust font size:

Hungary re-opened a border crossing on Friday between Hungary's Roszke and Serbia's Horgos and planned to lengthen opening hours for other crossings, local wire service MTI reported, citing Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Peter Szijjarto, while clamping down on illegal crossings with a fence covering 175 kilometers of border.

Szijjarto and Serbian Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs Ivica Dacic attended the ceremony. They called for a joint solution to the flood of migrants, saying that the over 100,000 migrants who have crossed from Serbia into European Union border-country Hungary since January are a problem not only for their countries but for the entire European Union as well.

Szijjarto said that Hungary planned to organize a conference in Budapest in October to be attended by the foreign and internal affairs ministers of the EU, the West Balkan nations and Turkey, seeking a way to reduce the immigration pressure of people escaping war and terrorist zones. Szijjarto suggested that the EU offer development aid to third countries.

He also suggested that many of these migrants had first entered the European Union through other gateways, where they should have been registered under the Dublin III EU rules, but apparently had not been. He urged all EU members to register migrants entering their countries. Under EU rules migrants could be returned to the countries in which they first entered the EU.

Dacic said he hoped a time could come when no border cross points or guarded borders would be needed, with Serbia also becoming an EU member. He also took the opportunity to say that relations between Serbia and Hungary were the best they had been in recent decades.

Hungary initially announced its intention to build a 175-km-long and 4-meter-high fence along its entire border with Serbia on June 17, citing a huge and growing wave of illegal border crossings, who have been using the country's southern border to enter the European Union. The fence, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said last Saturday, would be finished by August 31. Endit