“Hungary welcomes the ruling by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in which the body accepted Hungary’s appeal with relation to the case concerning two Bangladeshi asylum-seekers, who according to the Court’s ruling of first instance were held unlawfully in the autumn of 2015 before being sent back to Serbia”, Deputy Justice Minister Pál Völner said in a telephone statement to Hungarian news agency MTI on Wednesday.

The Ministry’s Parliamentary State Secretary said that from the very beginning Hungary had rejected the ECHR’s original ruling in the case, according to which Hungary had violated several points of the European Convention on Human Rights, as a result of which it must pay the plaintiffs 5.8 million forints each in damages, in addition to legal costs.

“It is clear that the Government is applying all possible means to combat the migrant business of the Soros organisations, and this is also why we turned to the Grand Chamber in Strasbourg (which acts as a court of appeal)”, said Mr. Völner, according to whom: ”It is also outrageous from a moral perspective that they want to punish us for fully conforming to the Schengen Regulations”.

The Deputy Minister expressed his hope that the Court will recognise that the original ruling “partly came about because of pressure from the Helsinki Committee, which represented the claimants, and partly because of the perhaps not entirely accurate professional opinions and information provided by the Committee”.

Mr. Völner highlighted the fact that a lack of consistency in such cases could cost Hungary billions. In reply to a question, he told reporters that no cases of this kind are currently in process in Hungarian courts, although the Helsinki Commission could be preparing to launch similar legal action.

In reply to a question concerning what would happen if the Grand Chamber rejected the appeal, the Deputy Justice Minister stressed: Hungary respects the rulings of international legal forums, but that does not mean that the Government might not initiate legal changes at international organisations that would “bring their activities up-to-date with reality”, thus enabling the defence of Europe.

The two men submitted requests for asylum at Hungary’s southern border on 15 September 2015. The authorities kept them at the transit zone in Röszke for over three weeks without letting them travel on towards Western Europe, before sending them back to Serbia on 8 October. In its ruling of first instance, which it issued in March of this year, the ECHR declared that through applying this procedure Hungary had violated the European Convention on Human Rights with regard to the right to freedom and security, the ban on torture and the right to effective legal redress.

Plaintiffs can turn to the Court, which operates under the aegis of the Council of Europe, citing the violation of the European Convention on Human Rights if they have already made use of all domestic opportunities for legal redress without success.

(Ministry of Justice/MTI)