Hungary Orban wants money from the EU for his anti-migrant policy

Hungary's right-wing populist Prime Minister Viktor Orban wants to ask the European Union to pay for what he sees as the successful defense against refugees. This is the result of a decree signed by Orban and published in the Hungarian Law Gazette.

It states that Hungary has spent around two billion euros on protecting the EU's external and Schengen borders since 2015. The EU owes Hungary this money. The "competent decision-makers" have therefore been instructed to examine whether this sum can be offset against the penalty payment that the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ordered Hungary to pay in June of this year due to its asylum policy. It initially remained unclear how Hungary intends to implement this plan.

In the summer of 2015, Hungary erected barbed wire fences on its borders with Serbia and Croatia in the midst of the refugee crisis. As a result, only a few irregular migrants entered the country via the Balkan route.

On June 13, the ECJ ruled that Hungary must pay 200 million euros and a daily penalty payment of one million euros for each day of delay because the country had failed to implement supreme court decisions on the asylum system. Hungary had violated EU treaties by deliberately circumventing the application of a common Union policy. This constituted a completely new and exceptionally serious violation of EU law, it was said from Luxembourg at the time.

The ECJ had already issued its first ruling on Hungary's refugee policy in 2020. This concerned, among other things, procedures in the now closed transit camps on the border with Serbia. The court later overturned the Hungarian regulation according to which people seeking protection first had to go through a preliminary procedure in Hungarian embassies before they were allowed to enter Hungary to apply for asylum. This practice still applies in Hungary.