Hungary will not implement the EU’s migration decisions and does not accept mandatory quotas, Prime Minister Viktor Orban told a Hungarian-Austrian-Serb migration summit meeting in Vienna on July 7 with Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic and Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer.

Hungary will find the "legal and political means" to prevent Brussels' decisions from being implemented, he added.

Under the quota system, Hungary would have to take in 10,000-30,000 people, the government estimated. 

Countries that decline to take in asylum seekers would have to pay between €10,000-€22,000 per migrants, or finance operational support, such as transport and infrastructure, according to the European Commission's proposal.

At a joint press conference, Orban said Hungary and Serbia were protecting Europe's external borders and that as many as 270,000 of 330,000 migrants stopped on Hungary's borders had been stopped on the Serbian-Hungarian border.

He said the migrant route in Hungary was the busiest due to the war in neighbouring Ukraine.

Hungary's model for managing migration is based on a simple principle: Nobody can enter the area of the country until their application for asylum has been processed, he said.

The prime minister said the Hungarian model works and should be adopted by all European countries. But this is not happening, because Brussels has adopted a regulation that imposes mandatory quotas and obliges member states to set up refugee camps, or "migrant ghettos".

The EU’s asylum system is not working and Austria, together with Hungary and Serbia, has clearly put the brakes on asylum, Nehammer said. We are allies in the fight against illegal migration and together we will fight organised crime.

Orban thanked Nehammer for taking a stand with Hungary at the latest EU summit in Brussels. He conceded that there might be solutions to deal with illegal migration on the sea, but said those solutions wouldn't work on dry land.

At the joint press conference, the issue of Hungary releasing hundreds of human traffickers from prison in the last months was not discussed. The move caused diplomatic tensions between the two countries. Budapest to let convicted human traffickers leave prison, citing high costs and the overcrowded penitentiaries.

The rise in illegal immigration on Hungary’s southern borders is giving Hungary’s strongman, increasingly isolated within the EU, ammunition and room of maneuver.

Fighting illegal migration has been one of the cornerstones of Viktor Orban’s nationalist government since the migrant crisis in 2015. The Hungarian cabinet has blamed the EU leaders for inviting refugees to come to the continent. The EU’s highest court in 2021 ruled that Hungary's law criminalising support for asylum seekers and limiting the right to asylum violated EU law.