BUDAPEST, Hungary – Sept 4 (Reuters) – Some 300 migrants broke out of a Hungarian border camp on Friday and hundreds of others set off on foot from Budapest as police scrambled to keep control of a migrant crisis that has brought Europe’s asylum system to breaking point.
Police said they had given chase and halted traffic on a nearby motorway after the migrants broke out of the Roszke reception centre on Hungary’s southern border with Serbia. They said another 2,300 migrants still inside were threatening to break out too.
In the capital, lawmakers moved to amend migration laws effectively sealing the southern border to a wave of migrants, many of them refugees from the Syrian war, voting to create “transit zones” where asylum seekers would be held until their requests are processed, and deported if denied.
The right-wing government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban has vowed to take control of Europe’s worst migration crisis since the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, sealing itself off to a flow of migrants that has topped 140,000 this year.
Hungary has become a flashpoint in the crisis as the main entry point into the EU for migrants travelling over land across the Balkan peninsula to reach richer and more generous countries further north and west, above all Germany.
Read the rest of Krisztina Than’s piece here.
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