Thousands of migrants were still stranded at Budapest’s main international railway station on Wednesday as authorities continued to enforce European Union rules that prevent them from leaving for Germany and other countries west of Hungary.
Around 3,000 migrants were at Keleti station in the Hungarian capital, many camping outside the main entrance guarded by police, who said citizen patrols were assisting them in keeping order.
But volunteer groups were providing food, clothing and medical assistance, even though they said they were accustomed to helping only a few hundred migrants at a time and were struggling with the large number of people staying in every corner of the station’s sunken plaza.
It came as former foreign secretary David Miliband called on Britain to return to its “humanitarian traditions” and take in more Syrian migrants.
“When I hear people say we’ve got to firm up our borders, it makes me think of the message we’re sending to Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey and Iraq, which is to keep their borders open for Syrians,” Mr Miliband told The Guardian in an interview in New York.
“People in Britain have got to understand that these countries notice the difference between what we’re saying and what we’re doing.
“Britain was at the forefront of writing the conventions and writing the protocols that established legal rights for refugees. A lot of the legal theory came out of the UK,” he said. “The reasons we did so were good in the the 40s and 50s and they are good today. What applied to Europeans then should apply to Africans and Asians today. We cannot say UN conventions apply to one group of people and not to others.”
More than 150,000 migrants have reached Hungary this year, most coming through the southern border with Serbia. An estimated 4000 migrants arrived on the Greek island of Lesbos on Saturday alone.