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Hungarian interior minister greets Slovak police coming to help at border

Xinhua, October 21, 2015 Adjust font size:

Hungarian Interior Minister Sandor Pinter welcomed the fifty members of the Slovak police force on Tuesday who came to Hungary to help with border controls, calling their presence a model of cooperation.

The Slovak police are prepared to work on the Serbian border, in what Pinter described as a joint response by the Visegrad Group (Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and Poland) to a common challenge.

Hungary has resolved to require obedience to European Union laws, and to the Schengen border control guidelines, Pinter said. The heads of the Visegrad Group countries have agreed to temporarily set up a joint police force to protect those borders and the Slovak police are the first group to respond to the decision, he added.

Pinter explained that to date over 390,000 people had illegally crossed Hungary's borders since the start of the year. Hungary, he said, is determined to protect those borders and to insist that people, including refugees, enter Hungary at official border crossings and under legally specified conditions, which means either with passports and visas or by registering as asylum seekers and waiting until a decision is made on the application.

Government spokesman Zoltan Kovacs said the Visegrad Group initiative was the start of a form of exemplary cooperation in protecting European Union borders. He described it as cooperation on regional level in response to a jointly acknowledged concern.

Kovacs said that Hungary and the Czech Republic would be signing an agreement next week to allow Czech police into Hungary, and a similar accord with Poland was being prepared.

In the meantime, Kovacs acknowledged that the closure of Hungary's southern border was doing its job and preventing illegal entries into Hungary. Border violators have to face our stricter laws, he concluded. Endit