PARIS
Hungarian Foreign Affairs Minister Peter Szijjarto said he would summon the French embassy representative on Monday after French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius's criticism of Hungary’s temporary wire fence at the Serbian border.
Szijjarto called his French counterpart's critique of a fence Hungary has put up at its border with Serbia as "shocking and groundless" in a statement issued Sunday.
"Instead of shocking and groundless judgments, one should instead concentrate on finding common solutions for Europe," Szijjarto said.
He added that a French embassy representative would be summoned to the Foreign Ministry Monday over Fabius's remarks.
On Sunday, Fabius called it "scandalous" the way certain Eastern European countries behaved during the current refugee crisis. The head of French diplomacy slammed Hungary in particular over the building of a wire fence along the border Serbian border.
" With regard to all those people who are politically chased out of their country, we have to be able to welcome them," he said. "Every country has to respond to that. France, Germany, others have, but when I see certain countries that do not accept these groups, I find that scandalous," Fabius said in interview to French radio Europe 1.
"I take a very dim view, a very dim view. Hungary is part of Europe. Europe has values and these values are not respected by putting up wire fences," he added.
"Europe can be criticized for not coming up with solutions quickly enough, that is true," he conceded.
Hungarian authorities are currently building a four-meter-high fence along its border with Serbia as it struggles to cope with record numbers of refugees and asylum seekers, who are generally bound for more prosperous EU countries such as Germany and Sweden.
"It appears that certain people in Europe are still not capable of understanding what astonishing and dramatic pressure Hungary is under from migration via the Western Balkans," said Szijjarto. "The Schengen rules clearly commit all EU members to protect their own and the outer borders of the EU. Hungary is doing this, and hence is also fulfilling its commitments to the Union."
So far this year, Hungary has received almost 150,000 refugees, 50,000 this month alone, mostly crossing from Serbia.
The UN's High Commissioner for Refugees spokeswoman, Melissa Fleming, announced on Friday in a briefing that the number of refugees and migrants crossing the Mediterranean this year had exceeded 300,000.
According to the International Organization for Migration, Germany alone is expected to receive 800,000 asylum applications by the end of the year, four times the number in 2014.
