Austrian Chancellor to send police to help defend Hungarian-Serbian border

With migration dominating the discussion between Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and Austrian Chancellor Christian Kern here on Tuesday, Austria announced at a news conference that it would send police to the Hungarian-Serbian border to help assure its integrity.

Kern said 20 members of the Austrian police force would soon be on the Hungarian-Serbian border, adding that an expert commission was being set up to see what else Austria could do to help.

Orban welcomed this, saying Hungary currently had 8,000 police and soldiers on that border and if current measures continued, Austria could be protected from illegal migrants entering the country.

However, Orban acknowledged that migrants had been traveling to Austria from Hungary since the European Commission had ordered Hungary to open its closed-off refugee camps. Hungary, Orban added, was only admitting as many migrants as it had the capacity to register and document.

The two leaders said Hungary was ready to take back migrants who had crossed into the European Union (EU) for the first time through Hungary, meaning migrants principally from Kosovo and Albania, whom Hungary would then send home.

Other migrants, who entered the EU in Greece, would hopefully be sent back there, Kern added, acknowledging there was an ongoing dispute between Hungary and the European Commission on this matter, given that migrants were often not registered before entering Hungary despite having come through another EU country first.

Kern said that if all points in his discussion with Orban were implemented, the outcome would be visible by late August or September.

That, he said, required reducing the number of migrants who crossed into Austria. However, he warned that forces in Austria were calling for stronger border controls.

Closing the border with Hungary was not Austria's primary goal, he added, considering Hungary was one of Austria's most important trading partners.

Orban pointed out that the two countries were in slightly different positions regarding the migration wave, especially since Hungary is an EU border country. While saying he understood Austria's restrictions on the common border, he said joint efforts to patrol the Hungarian-Serbian border were the best way to protect the Austrian border.

Both men voiced their sympathy with France following the attack there earlier on Tuesday in which one person was killed and another seriously wounded. Endit