After the distressing footage of the journalist who tripped a fleeing migrant, Hungary has produced another video shaking the international community. It is a film shot clandestinely inside the largest camp in which refugees are "received" — that of Roszke, a short distance from the border with Serbia. The dramatic sequence of frames shows around 150 people crammed inside a large hall, surrounded by metal wire fencing. With their hands raised to the sky, people scramble in an attempt to catch packets of food thrown by a group of police officers, many of whom have their faces covered by helmets and masks.

"It was like watching animals being fed in a cage. Like a Guantanamo in Europe," Alexander Spritzendorfer, husband of Michaela — the person who filmed the scene and posted it on YouTube — told the press. Both are volunteers who had travelled to the site to bring some food, clothing and medicine. "What we saw also tells us a great deal about the kind of people we are dealing with: despite the bread being scarce, and despite them all being clearly starving, there were no problems among them."

Just in recent days, the NGO Human Rights Watch has sharply criticised the conditions in which migrants find themselves in the reception camps, and in the Roszke camp in particular. The Hungarian government, for its part, has shown no inclination whatsoever to welcome asylum seekers. Well known is the decision — as clamorous as it is pointless and anachronistic — to hastily erect a "wall" of barbed wire running for 175 kilometres along the Serbian border. As of midnight last night, moreover, a law has come into force providing for up to three years' imprisonment for anyone who crosses it.

A second barrier is under construction and should be completed by the end of October. Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán declared, in an interview given to the German newspaper Bild, that migrants "do not come from Syria but from neighbouring countries, from which they are moving not because they are in danger but because they want to live like Germans or Swedes." For this reason, he concluded, they will be pushed back "to where they came from."