Controlling irregular migration: International human rights standards and the Hungarian legal framework

Abstract

In the summer of 2015 Hungary constructed a 175 km long barbed-wire fence at its southern border with Serbia. New criminal offences and asylum procedures were introduced that limited access to refugee status determination and ignored agreed EU asylum policy, deterring and de facto preventing asylum seekers from entering Hungarian territory. This paper provides an analysis of these new measures, which criminalized asylum seekers, and the subsequent Hungarian policy in relation to the case law of the European Court of Human Rights – arguing that the Hungarian authorities excessively abused their discretion in implementing these new policies of immigration and border control.

Availability of human rights and the case study of irregular economic migrants in Thailand and Hungary

“…The new criminal law modifications created major human rights issues (Gyollai & Amatrudo, 2018). In fact, motions requesting suspension of the criminal proceedings that were submitted by the defendants' legal representatives were systematically rejected by the court on the grounds that eligibility for international protection was not a relevant issue to criminal liability (Gyollai & Amatrudo, 2018).…”

The reception and integration of refugees from Ukraine in Poland, Czechia, Slovakia and Hungary – the New Immigration Destinations of Central Europe

“…The country's profile shifted from a sending country to a "receiving and transit country", and then an NID two decades ago, alongside the country's EU accession. The share of migrants in the Hungarian population increased from 1.5% at the turn of millennia (Illés et al, 2022) to 4% between 2011 and 2016, when the majority of foreigners were EU nationals (Gyollai, 2018;Bálint et al, 2017). Then, steady increase since 2016 resulted in the number of foreigners totalling almost 585,000 people in 2021, which constituted over 6% of the overall population of Hungary (United Nations, 2022;European Commission, 2021).…”

5 Revising Humanitarianism and Solidarity . Migration Management and Peripheral Europeanism in the UK, Poland, and Hungary

“…We have shown elsewhere how the Hungarian government dismantled the entire asylum system and criminalised migration (Gyollai and Amatrudo, 2019;Gyollai, 2018); denied international protection for asylum seekers with respect to the human rights of Hungarians and conditioned humanitarian support for would-be asylum seekers in the country of origin to belonging to Christian communities (Korkut, Terlizzi and Gyollai, 2020); and clashed with the EU on migration related issues that eventually resulted in numerous infringement proceedings (Gyollai and Korkut, 2020). Although indicative of a larger political agenda, none of these issues serve other than domestic electoral purposes.…”