The European Court of Justice had sentenced Hungary to pay high fines because of its repressive asylum policy. Now the government in Budapest wants to present the EU with a bill.
Hungary’s right-wing populist Prime Minister Viktor Orban wants to make the European Union pay for what he sees as the successful repelling of refugees. This is stated in a decree signed by Orban that was published in the Hungarian Official Gazette.
It states that Hungary has spent around two billion euros on protecting the EU’s external and Schengen borders since 2015. The EU owes Hungary this money. The “responsible decision-makers” have therefore been instructed to examine whether this sum can be offset against the fine that the European Court of Justice (ECJ) sentenced Hungary to pay in June of this year because of its asylum policy. How Hungary intends to implement this plan in concrete terms remains unclear at first.
In the summer of 2015, Hungary erected barbed wire fences on its borders with Serbia and Croatia in the midst of the refugee crisis. As a result, only a few irregular migrants entered the country via the Balkan route.
On June 13, the European Court of Justice ruled that Hungary must pay 200 million euros plus a daily penalty of one million euros for each day of delay because the country had failed to implement the highest court rulings on the asylum system. Hungary had violated EU treaties because it deliberately avoided applying a common Union policy. This represented a completely new and exceptionally serious violation of EU law, Luxembourg said at the time.
The ECJ had already issued its first ruling on Hungarian refugee policy in 2020. Among other things, it concerned procedures in the now closed transit camps on the border with Serbia. The court later overturned the Hungarian regulation according to which asylum seekers must first undergo a preliminary procedure in Hungarian embassies before they may be allowed to enter Hungary to apply for asylum there. This practice still applies in Hungary.
Hungarian Official Gazette, Decree 264/2024. (VIII. 29.) , page 151, Hungarian
Source: Stern
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