Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban addresses the media after receiving the results of the European Parliamentary elections in Budapest, Hungary on Monday, June 10, 2024.
Hungary had not implemented a 2020 ruling from top EU judges in Luxembourg, the ECJ wrote in a press release. “That failure, which consists in deliberately avoiding the application of a common EU policy as a whole, constitutes an unprecedented and extremely serious infringement of EU law.”“It seems that illegal migrants are more important to the Brussels bureaucrats than their own European citizens,” he wrote on the social media platform X.
The case concerns changes Hungary made to its asylum system in the wake of that crisis, when some 400,000 people passed through Hungary on their way to Western Europe. Hungary built fences protected by razor wire on its southern borders with Serbia and Croatia and a pair of transit zones for holding asylum seekers on its border with Serbia. Those transit zones have since closed.
Back in 2020, the ECJ found that Budapest’s policies had restricted access to international protection, unlawfully detained asylum applicants and failed to observe their right to stay in Hungary while their application went through the full due process, the court recalled on Thursday.