Rights court slams Hungary for mass deportations

(CN) — Europe’s human rights court on Tuesday condemned Hungary’s far-right and anti-immigrant government for carrying out illegal deportations, including mass expulsions, of asylum-seekers since 2016.

In its ruling, the European Court of Human Rights examined the cases of two males from Afghanistan and one from Syria deported to Serbia. Still, the ruling was unlikely to change Hungary’s harsh anti-immigrant policies due to the country’s refusal to change its asylum laws.

The rights court, based in Strasbourg, France, found Hungary failed to adequately process the plaintiffs’ claims for asylum and ruled that “collective expulsions” of asylum-seekers are illegal under the European Convention on Human Rights. Since 2020, Hungary’s asylum law has been found illegal by the European Court of Justice, the European Union’s highest court based in Luxembourg.

The human rights court demanded that Hungary scrap a 2016 law that allows authorities to automatically expel foreigners deemed to have entered Hungary illegally or who are staying in the country without permission. The law was passed in the wake of a massive influx of refugees into the EU in 2015 following the outbreak of civil war in Syria.

Tuesday’s ruling was the latest warning about a sharp slide in Hungary’s human rights record under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, a far-right nationalist opposed to the European Union’s liberal democratic system. Orbán is a close ally of U.S. President Donald Trump, who is sparking outrage in the United States with his push for mass deportations.

As with previous rulings from the European Court of Human Rights, Hungary was expected to ignore this latest decision, though it was likely to pay small damage amounts of between 5,000 euros ($5,800) and 10,000 euros ($11,600) to the three men. They were represented by the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, a human rights group in Budapest.

“Hungary will pay the damages to the individual clients of ours, to the victims,” said András Léderer, the head of advocacy at the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, in a telephone interview. “But besides that, I don’t have any expectation that anything will happen.”

Hungary’s Ministry of Justice and Orbán’s office did not immediately reply to queries from Courthouse News.

Hungary prefers getting hit with massive EU fines rather than come into compliance with EU and human rights laws on asylum.

Last June, the Court of Justice fined Hungary 200 million euros ($216 million) and imposed a daily one-million-euro penalty for failing to follow the bloc’s asylum laws and illegally deporting migrants. Budapest has refused to pay the fines, which now amount to more than 500 billion euros. In retaliation, Brussels deducts EU funds slated to go to Hungary.

Tuesday’s ruling shined a light on the plight of asylum-seekers in Hungary but also in other parts of the EU, which has become increasingly harsh toward asylum-seekers.

The three men at the center of this ruling were identified only by initials to protect their privacy, a common practice in European court systems.

H.Q., one of the Afghan men, was expelled from Hungary in September 2021 when he was in his mid-20s. He applied for asylum following the return to power of the Taliban in Afghanistan. At the time, he was living in Hungary without proper paperwork after his student visa ran out in 2019.

H.Q. said he feared returning to Afghanistan because he had been detained by the Taliban when he was living there, and he feared the militant group would persecute him because his father had worked for the previous American-backed government.

Nonetheless, Hungarian authorities rejected his application three days after he filed for asylum and deported him. He was taken to the Serbian border and forced to walk out of the country.

The other Afghan, identified as Z.A., was smuggled by van into Hungary on Feb. 16, 2022. But the van was involved in a traffic accident, and he was seriously injured. He was 16 at the time of the accident, and his status as a child unaccompanied by an adult should have provided him with even greater protection under international asylum laws. At a hospital in Szeged, his spleen and one of his kidneys were removed.

In the hospital, he told a doctor he wanted to seek asylum in Hungary because his father had been killed by the Taliban and that he had been detained by the militant group.

But police deported him anyway in April to Serbia, forcing him across the border without his belongings and walking barefoot, according to the ruling.

“He was ordered, together with about a dozen Arabic-speaking men, to pass through the transit zone exit and to cross over to Serbia, which he did,” a court news release said.

The Syrian man, identified as A.S.A., got to Hungary clandestinely on July 9, 2022, after he was picked up by a smuggler with a minibus, according to details in the ruling. He too was involved in a road accident and taken to a hospital in Budapest, where he was in a coma for six days.

On July 17, 2022, with the help of an interpreter, he contacted the Hungarian Helsinki Committee and sought asylum in Hungary. He was in his early 20s at the time.

He said he fled Aleppo, a Syrian city then under rebel control, because it was dangerous. He said he faced the threat of persecution and being forced into recruitment by the Kurdish military.

Nonetheless, Hungarian authorities denied him asylum, and he was deported after he was discharged from the hospital in July 2022, the ruling said.

“Police officers then handcuffed him, put a leash around his wrists and took him to a police station, where his personal data was registered,” the court wrote. “On the same day, at around 10 p.m., police transferred him to a so-called ‘collection point’ where he was kept, still handcuffed, with other foreigners until around midnight when he was taken to the border fence.”

Still wearing a neck brace and with an injured right arm, he was forced to walk across the border into Serbia with about 40 other people in the early hours of the next day, the court said.

Léderer said about 400,000 people have been expelled under similar conditions since 2016 under Hungary’s harsh asylum laws.

He said Hungary’s violations of asylum laws are part of a larger pattern of human rights abuse by Orbán’s government. Most recently, Hungary came under fire for banning LGBTQ parades, best known as “pride parades.”

“There is a pride ban. There is serious limitation on the right to freedom of assembly,” Léderer said. “The government just allowed the use of facial recognition technology for the authorities against all and any offenders of petty offenses.”

He said Hungary’s human rights violations are “getting worse.”

“The picture is quite clear and very bleak,” he said.

Courthouse News reporter Cain Burdeau is based in the European Union.

Follow @cainburdeau