Orban confident EU will reimburse Hungary's border protection costs

BUDAPEST (Reuters) -Prime Minister Viktor Orban said on Friday he was confident that the European Commission would reimburse Hungary's costs for protecting the European Union's external border from illegal migration.

Hungary closed down a major transit route through Hungary for hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers fleeing war and poverty in 2015, bolstering his support at home but earning him widespread criticism from many EU allies.

But Orban said Germany had finally started to "wake up" to the adverse impacts of migration. Berlin this week announced border checks for the next six months at all its land borders, as well as proposals to reduce the number of asylum seekers.

"Hungary must be reimbursed for the very significant amount which border protection has cost us," he told state radio. "They will pay, it is only a matter of time."

On Thursday, his chief of staff said Hungary was ready to sue the Commission for its border protection costs, which Budapest says amount to 2 billion euros.

In June, the European Union's top court ruled that Hungary must pay a 200-million-euro fine for not implementing changes to its policy of handling migrants and asylum seekers at its border, a decision that Orban at the time called outrageous.

"Now there is only one more step that Western European leaders should take, it is not particularly hard intellectually: that if they say that borders must be protected, then those who actually protect the borders should not be punished for that," he said on Friday, referring to the fine.

(Reporting by Krisztina Than; Editing by Kevin Liffey)

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