On Thursday the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ), the Union court that deals with compliance with European rules and treaties, sentenced Hungary to pay a fine of 200 million euros for failing to implement one of his 2020 rulings which concerned the failure of the Hungarian authorities to comply with European rules on the right to asylum. The fine will increase by one million euros for each day of delay in carrying out the sentence as Hungary does not comply with the sentence. The Court defined Hungary’s violation as an “unprecedented and exceptionally serious violation of Union law”.
The 2020 ruling concerned a law adopted by the Hungarian government in 2015, when hundreds of thousands of migrants tried to arrive in Western Europe via the so-called “Balkan route”. At the time, the Hungarian government had established “transit zones” on the border with Serbia in which to host migrants, evaluate their asylum requests and carry out rejections towards Serbia. The Court, however, judged that very few migrants actually managed to ask for asylum, that the centers built in the “transit zones” closely resembled prisons, and that in some cases some asylum seekers had been summarily rejected from Hungarian territory, a circumstance explicitly prohibited by European treaties.
Even today in Hungary, people can only apply for asylum outside the Hungarian borders, in embassies in neighboring Serbia or Ukraine, and those who try to cross the border are systematically rejected.
On Facebook, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who has governed the country in a semi-authoritarian manner since 2010, defined the fine as “outrageous and unacceptable” and it is unlikely that Hungary will end up paying it: the Court’s decision is in theory binding, but there is no body that can force the country to respect it and Hungary is known for not respecting the decisions of the European Union, which has been sanctioning it heavily for years for many other issues.
