Austrian Lawmaker Backs EU Refugee Quota Challenge as ‘Absolute Must’

The EU quota plan to resettle refugees across the bloc should be confronted as a violation of European principles, an Austrian lawmaker and Freedom Party of Austria (FPO) member told Sputnik on Thursday.

MOSCOW (Sputnik), Svetlana Alexandrova – Hungarian lawmakers voted on Tuesday to challenge the European resettlement scheme, paving the way to a European Court of Justice lawsuit planned for early December.

“It is an absolute must to challenge it,” Johannes Hubner said. “This plan violates fundamental European rights.”

Hubner said that despite Austria's previous favorable vote for the redistribution scheme two months ago, “every reasonable government should tell the European Union that we will not implement this quota plan.”

Slovak, Czech and Romanian interior ministers joined Hungary at the September 22 session in voting against a quota system that would resettle some 160,000 refugees throughout the EU over the next two years.

The Austrian lawmaker cited newly-elected Polish leadership's announcement of plans to stop accepting refugees after the deadly November 13 Paris attacks. Poland previously voted in favor of the EU refugee quota, breaking ranks with the Central and Eastern European EU members.

Hubner stated that forcing EU member states to take in new citizens “is a total misuse of the EU institutions” and blamed the Austrian government for contributing to what is seen as the largest migrant crisis in Europe since World War II.

Austrian borders must be sealed off from illegal migrants in the same way Hungary did in September, Johannes Hubner said.

"The borders have to be closed and sealed. We have to do what the Hungarians already did," Johannes Hubner said.

Hubner said he wished to send a clear message that "illegal immigration is a criminal offense in our country and those who will try to come illegally will be arrested."

The lawmaker criticized both the Austrian and German national governments for exacerbating the open-border area "in deadly crisis" with their policy of allowing illegal immigration.

"The future for the Schengen area is not very bright because the whole system is in a deadly crisis now," Hubner stressed. "Some countries, like my own, do everything to undermine those principles even further."

According to Hubner, inefficient deportations of migrants denied asylum in the European Union fuel illegal immigration into the country and the wider European migrant crisis.

"For the last year, there were no virtually any deportations from the EU. It means we are still promoting the illegal immigration," Johannes Hubner said.

FPO more than doubled its showing at the September municipal and mayoral elections, gaining over 30 percent of votes behind aggressive anti-migrant sentiment in Europe.