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Migrants bake bread and cook a dish in a building of an abandoned estate in the outskirts of Horgos, Northern Serbia, near the Hungarian border | Credit: EPA/Edvard Molnar
Migrants bake bread and cook a dish in a building of an abandoned estate in the outskirts of Horgos, Northern Serbia, near the Hungarian border | Credit: EPA/Edvard Molnar

NGO says Hungary denies food to asylum seekers

Latest update : 2018/08/23
By ANSA Latest update : 2018/08/23

The Hungarian Helsinki Committee has denounced that migrants in Hungary whose asylum applications have been judged inadmissible are being denied access to food in transit zones.

The human rights organisation Hungarian Helsinki Committee (HHC) is criticizing new rules for asylum seekers entering Hungary, saying that these measures are designed to pressure people to leave the country. 

On July 1, the new measures went into effect, but weren't put into practice until mid-August. 

Now, according to Section 51 of the Hungarian Asylum Act, an asylum application is considered inadmissible 

  • if the applicant arrived through a country where he or she was not exposed to persecution or to serious harm or
  • if he or she arrived through a country where an adequate level of protection was available. 

Many asylum seekers come to Hungary from Serbia. HHC believes that because Hungary regards Serbia as a safe third country, the new inadmissibility provisions "abolish any remaining access to a fair asylum procedure in practice." HHC says the policy is not compatible with current EU law. 

According to HHC, when asylum seekers file an appeal, the migrants are expelled from Hungary and ordered to remain in a transit zone, where they are denied access to food. The HHC also says that the short deadline to file for an appeal (just 3 days) and the fact that asylum applicants can be expelled even when their appeal in still pending constitute a "breach of the right to an effective remedy." 

"This amounts to inhuman treatment and an absurd legal situation," HHC said in a statement.

Food denied to asylum seekers

HHC says that the Hungarian Immigration and Asylum Office (IAO) informs foreigners that they will not be given food in the transit zone and that the IAO refuses to provide food to foreigners in the transit zones with the aim of dissuading them from pursuing court appeals against inadmissibility decisions. The goal of the Hungarian government, HHC believes, is to make these people abandon their asylum applications by leaving the transit zones and returning to Serbia.

In order to put an end to the treatment they consider inhuman, HHC attorneys submitted requests for interim measures to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). The ECHR granted interim measures in three cases, ordering the Hungarian government to provide food to the applicants.