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Hungarian PM Announces Referendum on EU Mandatory Migrant Quotas

© Sputnik / Sergei Guneev / Go to the mediabankHungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban during press conference in the Parliament building in Budapest
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban during press conference in the Parliament building in Budapest - Sputnik International
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Hungary will convene a referendum on the EU mandatory quotas on refugee relocation.

Migrants struggle to board a bus sent to pick them up on the closed highway A4 towards Vienna at the Austrian side of the border between Hungary and Austria on September 11, 2015 near Nickelsdorf, Austria - Sputnik International
Hungary Outside EU Refugee Quota System - European Parliament President
MOSCOW (Sputnik) — Budapest has decided to convene a referendum on the EU mandatory quotas on refugee relocation, obliging the country to take in some 2,300 refugees, the country's Prime Minister Viktor Orban said Wednesday.

"I am convinced that the government is responding to the public mood. We cannot agree [to quotas] in contradiction of the people's will," Orban told reporters in the Hungarian capital, as quoted by the Hungarian Heti Vilaggazdasag weekly, without elaborating on a possible date for the vote.

On September 14, 2015, European interior ministers adopted a mechanism to relocate some 40,000 refugees residing in Italy and Greece throughout the bloc’s 28 members on an equitable basis at an extraordinary meeting.

About a week later, the bloc's interior ministers agreed to relocate some 120,000 asylum seekers, currently in Greece, Italy and Hungary, to other EU member countries under a mandatory quota system in an attempt to ease the burden on the union’s frontier states.

Hungary is one of the four Visegrad Group (V4 group) states, along with Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, which opposes the implementation of the EU mandatory quota scheme to share thousands of refugees within the 28-nation bloc.

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