The European Union, on Sept. 18, began the process of deducting hundreds of millions of euros in funds meant to go to Hungary after Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s government refused to pay a huge fine for breaking the bloc’s rules on asylum.
In June, Europe’s top court ordered Budapest to pay 200 million euros ($223 million) for consistently depriving immigrants of their right to apply for asylum.
The court also imposed an additional fine of a million euros for every day Hungary failed to comply.
The European Court of Justice (ECJ) described Hungary’s actions as “an unprecedented and extremely serious infringement of EU law.”
In response, Orbán slammed the ruling as “outrageous and unacceptable.”
The European Commission, the bloc’s executive branch, said that given Hungary’s failure to pay or provide information about its intentions, it would move to what the commission calls the “off-setting procedure” by taking the money from common funds that would otherwise go to Budapest.
“So, what we are going to do now is to deduct the [200 million euros] from upcoming payments from the EU budget towards Hungary,” commission spokesman Balazs Ujvari said.
He added that it would take time to identify which parts of Hungary’s funding would be subject to deduction.
Ujvari said the commission has also sent a first payment request on the daily fines amounting to 93 million euros ($103 million) so far.
“Counting from receipt, the Hungarian authorities will have 45 days to make that payment,” he said.
Budapest has taken a robust approach to immigration to the country since more than 1 million people arrived in Europe in 2015, most of them claiming to be fleeing conflict in Syria.
The case against Hungary concerns changes made to the nation’s asylum system in the wake of that migration crisis, when some 400,000 people passed through Hungarian territory on their journey to Western Europe.
Budapest ordered that fences with razor wire be erected on its southern borders with Serbia and Croatia and that a pair of transit zones for holding asylum seekers be set up on its Serbian border.
In 2020, the ECJ found that Hungary had restricted access to international protection, unlawfully detained asylum applicants, and failed to observe their right to stay while their applications were processed.
The transit zones were shut in 2020, shortly after that ruling.
But the commission, which is responsible for monitoring the 27 member states’ compliance with their shared laws, took the view that Hungary had still not complied and requested that the ECJ impose a fine.
After the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak in 2020, the government also pushed through a law forcing asylum seekers to travel to Belgrade or Kyiv to apply for a travel permit at its embassies there before entering Hungary.
Only once back in Hungary could they file their applications.
According to international law, people have the right to apply for asylum or other forms of international protection if they fear for their safety in their home countries or face the prospect of persecution based on their race, religion, ethnic background, or gender.
This week’s development comes after Orbán said on Sept. 13 that he was confident the European Commission would reimburse Hungary’s costs for protecting the European Union’s external border from illegal migration.
“Hungary must be reimbursed for the very significant amount which border protection has cost us,” he told state radio. “They will pay; it is only a matter of time.”
