BUDAPEST: A senior UN human rights official urged Hungary on Wednesday to move asylum-seeking families held in"prison-like" transit zones on the Serbian border to other facilities in Hungary that he said are almost empty.
Presenting the first findings of a report on the treatment of migrants, he told a news conference that children should not be detained based on their migratory status. Prime Minister Viktor Orban leads a nationalist government with a strongly anti-immigrant platform, an issue that has dominated his agenda since 2015, when hundreds of thousands of migrants marched through Hungary en route to western Europe.Gonzalez Morales said the fact that asylum-seekers were still held in the"prison-like environment" of transit zones, with barbed-wire defences even on the roofs of sections holding children, might be seen as an attempt to intimidate people there.
Gonzalez Morales said Orban's government, which provided the monitor unimpeded access to facilities it wanted to visit, did not consider transit zones places of detention and did not provide a reason why children with families were held in there.