This comes as Hungary has enforced a set of harsh new laws which are meant to stop the huge flow of asylum seekers through the country. According to some new legislation, it is a felony to cross the fence that the country has built along its southern border with Serbia.
Gyorgy Bakondi, head of Hungary’s national disaster unit, has defended his country’s decision to close the border to the refugees. "This can serve to temporarily place persons seeking refugee or protected status as well as to process asylum claims and alien registration procedures."
Hungarian law enforcement agencies have arrested more than five dozen refugees for attempting to illegally enter the border with Serbia by breaching a razor-wire fence.
Meanwhile, a Serbian government minister has said that his country was talking to senior Hungarian officials about the buildup of asylum seekers on their frontier, emphasizing that Budapest would "have to open the border."
The International Organization for Migration (IOM) has said that a Hungarian crackdown on refugees "looks like" a contravention of its obligations under European Union (EU) and United Nations (UN) rules on asylum and refugees.
"Both the international UN conventions on the status of refugees, but also EU legislation regarding asylum and also regarding criminal procedures," Magdalena Majkowska-Tomkin, head of the Hungary office of the IOM said.
UNHCR spokeswoman Melissa Fleming has said that a new route for refugees seeking asylum in the European Union is likely to open up as Hungary restricts entry.
"We`re definitely in touch with different countries on contingencies and UNHCR is ready to move and assist different countries as best we can," Fleming said, adding. "It`s going to be just as much a struggle as it has been for Macedonia and Greece."
The European Union Frontex external border agency said in a statement on Tuesday that more than half a million refugees have been counted on the bloc’s borders so far this year.
"More than 500,000 migrants were detected at EU borders in the first eight months of this year after a fifth consecutive monthly record was registered in August when 156,000 crossed the EU borders," the statement said, noting, "there were 280,000 detections" at EU borders last year.
On Monday, the interior ministers of EU member states held an emergency meeting on the persisting flow of refugees to Europe following measures by Germany and Austria to restore border checks to halt the continuing arrival of asylum seekers.
During the Monday meeting in Belgium’s capital, Brussels, the ministers attempted to narrow their differences on how to distribute the responsibility for the steady arrival of thousands of refugees fleeing from foreign-backed conflicts in the Middle East.
The continent is now divided over how to deal with the influx of people, mainly Syrians fleeing the four-year foreign-backed militancy in their homeland.
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