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Brussels (ANSA) – Hungary is condemned to pay a sum of 200 million euros and a penalty of 1 million euros for each day of delay for not executing a 2020 Court of Justice ruling which established that Budapest did not comply with EU law norms related to procedures on the recognition of international protection and the repatriation of third-country nationals with irregular stay.
Since then, the ruling has remained a dead letter, with the sole exception of the transit zones that Hungary had set up at the border with Serbia to assess asylum requests and carry out pushbacks to the Balkan country in violation of European and international law. The European Commission has therefore decided to file another lawsuit to demand that Budapest implement European asylum rules and pay for not having done so until now.
According to the judges, deliberately evading the application of a common EU policy, as Hungary has done in this case, constitutes an “unprecedented and exceptionally serious violation of EU law,” which is why it has condemned Budapest to pay a lump sum of two hundred million euros and a record fine of one million euros per day starting from June 13, the day of the issuance of the new ruling.
For the Court, Hungary’s behavior represents a “significant threat” to the unity of European law, seriously prejudicing both the private interests of asylum seekers and the public interest, because it results in “transferring to other Member States the responsibility of ensuring the reception of asylum seekers, assessing the applications, and eventually carrying out repatriations”.
The ruling also serves as a warning for the new EU Pact on Migration and Asylum which Budapest threatens not to implement. Harsh was the reaction of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who labeled the ruling as “unacceptable and outrageous” adding that “for Brussels bureaucrats illegal migrants are more important than their European citizens” (June 13).