Budapest will also be fined a million euros daily until it complies with the court’s decision four years ago. But the country’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, has previously said that Hungary will "maintain the existing regime even if the European court ordered us to change it."
The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) ruled in December 2020 that Hungary had failed to implement EU rules on asylum applications and the repatriation of migrants found to have entered illegally.
The CJEU said in a statement on Thursday that Hungary had failed "to comply with the 2020 judgment as regards the right of applicants for international protection to remain in Hungary pending a final decision on their appeal against the rejection of their application and the removal of illegally staying third-country nationals."
Following the entry into Hungary in 2015 of more than a million people, mostly from Syria, Budapest’s nationalist government took a hard line on migration, constructing barriers at its borders and enacting anti-immigration policies. The European Commission, the EU’s executive, took Hungary to the CJEU on charges of restricting access to asylum procedures and unlawfully detaining migrants in transit zones, thereby denying them the right to remain in Hungary while their claims were considered.
Subsequently, following the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Hungarian lawmakers enacted legislation forcing asylum seekers to travel to the country’s Belgrade or Kyiv embassies to apply for an entry permit, only after which could they file an asylum claim.
Budapest’s failure to abide by the 2020 ruling led the Commission to launch a new legal action, the result of which was the court’s decision on Thursday to impose the fine. The penalty includes a lump-sum payment of €200 million and a further daily fine of €1 million until Orbán’s Fidesz government complies with the original ruling.
The court said in a statement that Hungary was “deliberately evading the application of the EU common policy on international protection as a whole and the rules relating to the removal of illegally-staying third-country nationals. That conduct constitutes a serious threat to the unity of EU law.”
Under common EU asylum procedures, people have the right to apply for international protection if they fear for their safety in their country of origin or if they face persecution on the grounds of race, ethnic background, gender, religion, or other forms of discrimination.
