“IS and other terrorist groups are able to have the desire to use the European Union’s soft laws, which are unable to handle the situation, to their advantage and send potential terrorists to Europe,” Gergely Gulyas said.
The US-based Endowment for Middle East Truth (EMET) advocacy group’s president Sarah Stern told Sputnik last month that some of the hundreds of thousands of migrants arriving to Europe from Syria and Iraq could be aligned to ISIL.
Gulyas, a Hungarian parliamentary group deputy leader, cited recent reports of suspected terrorists disguised as refugees being detained in Austria and Germany, as well as in Hungary. The politician also pointed to an ISIL cell, uncovered close to EU borders in Bosnia and Herzegovina last summer, as an example of the terrorist threat.
“That is why physical protection of external borders – or rather guarantee of the effectiveness of the closure – is needed,” Gulyas observed.
He said border protection was required to avoid the “presumption of automatic” refugee status on the part of potential fundamentalist fighters.
The UN Refugee Agency estimated this week that a majority of the half-a-million migrants that have made their way to Europe this year arrived from Syria, where a four-year civil war has displaced millions of people.
