Hungary plans to sue European Commission to reimburse EU external border protection costs, PM aide says

Hungary is ready to sue the European Commission of the European Union (EU) to reimburse the costs of protecting the EU’s external border, which Budapest says has cost it some 2 billion euros ($2.20 billion), Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s chief of staff said, reports Reuters.

Orban closed down a major transit route through Hungary for hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers fleeing war and poverty in 2015, bolstering his support at home but earning him widespread criticism from many EU allies.

“We are ready to sue the European Commission after it had reimbursed partially or in full the costs incurred by other member states protecting the Schengen border,” Gergely Gulyas told a news conference on Thursday. “Hungary has spent two billion euros on protecting the Schengen border in the past years without getting any meaningful contribution whatsoever from the EU.”

“We can see that there are changes in Europe,” Gulyas said. “In 2015 the Hungarian Prime Minister was the first to clearly say that unless the EU enforces community law and the Schengen Agreement … then Schengen will collapse.”

Gulyas said the decision by Berlin to impose border controls from Monday means that Germany was destroying the free movement area within the EU.

“First it destroyed it by not making EU member states efficiently protect the external border, and now it is destroying it by imposing internal border controls,” the Orban administration official said.