It was no surprise that the United Nations’ African, Asian, Latin American and small island member states voted for the UN’s migration compact at Wednesday’s General Assembly session, given that it supports their interests, Hungary’s foreign minister said in New York after the vote on the document.
Hungary was one of five countries to vote against the document. The UN General Assembly approved the accord with 152 countries voting in favour of it, five against it and 12 abstentions.
Speaking to public media, Péter Szijjártó said that over the past year, “not a single European politician attended the preparatory meetings” for the compact. “Europe’s interests were barely represented,” he said. This is why, he argued, the accord is more of an African-Asian-Latin American compact than a global one, as its name would indicate.
Of the 28 European Union member states, nine did not vote for the package, he said. Szijjártó pointed out that at the beginning of the process, the “bureaucrats and politicians belonging to Europe’s liberal mainstream” said that Hungary was again “going its own way”, whereas now one-third of EU member states disagreed with the document.
It was also clear, he said, that the countries that voted against the agreement were those whose leaders put the safety of their citizens first. The countries that backed the document, on the other hand, will have to take responsibility for their contribution to the emergence of new migration waves, he said.
In response to a question, Szijjártó said he also held business talks in New York, and reached an agreement with a major American IT service firm that will build IT development bases in Budapest and Szeged. The investment which will be worth over 10 million euros will create more than 100 new jobs, Szijjártó said, without naming the company in question.