EU court slaps $216m fine on Hungary for not following asylum laws
Al Jazeera
Current Hungarian law only allows applicants to submit request for asylum outside of the country, defying EU rules.
The European Union’s top court has slapped Hungary with a 200-million-euro ($216m) fine and imposed a daily one-million-euro ($1.08m) penalty for failing to follow the bloc’s asylum laws and for illegally deporting migrants.
Hungary’s anti-immigrant government has taken a hard line on people entering the country since well over one million refugees and asylum seekers entered Europe in 2015, most of them fleeing conflict in Syria. It erected border fences and forcefully tried to stop many from entering.
In its verdict issued on Thursday, the European Court of Justice said Hungary had failed to take measures “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”.
“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,” Thursday’s ECJ verdict added.
A Hungarian government spokesman did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment on the ECJ ruling.
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