“We must reach further agreements regarding practical implementation, and the Americans must have the necessary technical conditions in place,” Ambassador of Hungary to the U.S. Ferenc Somogyi said, explaining that the US wants to electronically register those leaving Hungary.

Krisztina Berta, head of the consular department at the Foreign Ministry, said it is likely that there will be no fees in the new system, she added.

In order for Hungary to join the U.S. visa-waiver programme, the percentage of rejections among Hungarians that apply for visas must fall below 10 percent. According to State Department data released last November, Hungary's visa refusal rate had exceeded the 10 percent ratio by three tenths of a percent in the twelve months from September 2006 to September 2007.

U.S. Ambassador to Hungary April H. Foley said last December that Hungary would certainly fulfil the 10 percent target in 2008.

Visa requirement not quite fulfilled

November 8, 2007

Hungary narrowly failed to reach the threshold for the removal of US visa requirements last year. In all, 10.3% of visa applications were rejected, only slightly above the maximum permitted 10%.

Some other countries in the bid for a visa waiver with the U.S. have managed to meet this requirement, among them Greece (1.6 percent), Cyprus (1.8 percent), Malta (2.7 percent), Estonia (4 percent) and the Czech Republic (6.7 percent). Poland fared much below the threshold at 25.2 percent and Romania had a 37.7 percent rejection rate during that period.

Diplomats expect Hungary can pass under the 10 percent mark by the autumn of 2008, the paper said.

The European Union has demanded a visa-free regime with the U.S. for all of its member states, but the actual installment is subject to negotiations.

New U.S. law brings us closer to the Visa Waiver Programme
August 29, 2007

Hungary hails the new U.S. law, including the option of extending the Visa Waiver Programme to Hungarians, as a major step forward, Hungarian Foreign Affairs Spokesman Gyorgy Odze told MTI. Odze commented the bill U.S. President George W Bush signed into law, which, according to the White House release, allows greater flexibility to bring some of the U.S.'s closest allies into the programme.

Hungarian diplomacy has been lobbying the U.S. administration and legislation consistently and for long to promote lifting the visa requirement to bring Hungary to equal platform with other close allies of the United States in combating terrorism, the spokesman said. Regarding a timeline the spokesman said it was yet hard to say exactly how soon would Hungarians be able to travel without a visa to the United States but expressed hope for the legislation procedures to be completed within one-and-a-half or two years.

He also expressed the conviction that Hungary would soon be able to meet the requirement the law retained for granting the visa-free status, namely that the annual ratio of rejected visa applications should stay below ten percent. Last year U.S. authorities rejected 12.7 percent of Hungarian visa applications, whereas the visa-refusal ratio has constantly been dropping over the past few years.

Commenting the law to MTI, U.S. affairs professor Tamas Magyarics expected no breakthrough in scrapping the U.S. visa regime for Hungary and other EU-member central and eastern European countries over the next one-and-a-half years. He argued that legislation procedure in the U.S. administration took time and politicians were anyway focused entirely on next year's presidential and congressional elections. In his view, it would be hard for the CEE countries to find a partner for speeding up the process since they are considered relatively light-weight even as a bloc. A visa-free status, even if granted, would not necessarily facilitate entry into the United States as authorities there would even in that case employ other techniques to obtain the data they need, he said. In all, neither Hungarians nor the citizens of other EU newcomers would threat the political and economic stability of the United States. The true challenge the U.S. has to meet is the inflow of tens of millions of immigrants from Latin America and the Far East, said Magyarics.