A top EU lawyer has delivered yet another blow to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and the policies of his administration. The lawyer said that the country's criminalization of individuals or groups who helped migrants stood at odds with EU law.
The policy of migrant returns between EU countries is complex and creates "blurred lines," an expert in EU law and migration has told InfoMigrants. In the light of two recent cases of returns from Austria to Hungary, we decided to take a closer look at the subject.
The Cypriot government has lashed out at Turkey, saying it was indirectly involved in helping create a new migration route that "disproportionally burdened" Cyprus. The island nation and EU member state has had the bloc’s highest percentage of asylum seekers for several years.
A dozen human rights associations have accused public prosecutors in Trieste, northeastern Italy, of not protecting the rights of asylum seekers. They say prosecutors failed to act when underage asylum seekers were housed in facilities for adults for months.
The European Court of Justice ruled that Hungary's deportation of refugees to Serbia was unlawful. But Viktor Orban's national-conservative government is ignoring the judgement — and continuing to deport refugees.
The Hungarian Helsinki Committee, along with various other human rights advocacy groups, have been busy collecting evidence documenting Hungary’s continual flouting of EU law with regards to pushbacks. Since the EU Court of Justice declared Hungary’s pushbacks illegal in December 2020, a recorded 4,903 people have been pushed back to Serbia.
The British government has staunchly dismissed rumors and views among some migrants and refugees in Calais that chances for getting asylum in the United Kingdom might improve for them after Brexit, stressing that the opposite was true.
Serbia's constitutional court has confirmed that the country has deported asylum-seekers to neighboring EU member state Bulgaria in contravention of international law.
The managing board the EU’s border agency Frontex announced that following an internal investigation, it did not yet find enough proof of any rights violations at sea involving Frontex agents. However, it also didn't rule out that pushbacks might have occurred in some of the instances.
The governor of the Italian region of Friuli Venezia Giulia, which borders with Slovenia, has said that the "European Union needs to help single member States control borders." Massimiliano Fedriga made the remarks on December 10, addressing a plenary session of the European Committee of the Regions.
The ban on deportations of Syrian nationals deemed to pose a risk to security in Germany will expire at the end of the year. The interior ministers of Germany's state governments had failed to agree on the terms of an extension. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that the expulsions will become possible on the practical level.
The UK Home Office charged 69 Albanian migrants in November this year with "illegally entering the country" on a boat. Now it has transpired that the boat was intercepted before they reached the UK and so the charges have been dropped.