The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has declared Hungary guilty of inhuman treatment of asylum seekers on three judgments delivered at Strasburg on October 5.
The cases were represented by the Hungarian Helsinki Committee.
The human rights organisation said that for more than five years, Hungarian transit zones were not a gateway to the country’s asylum protection, as promised by the government; instead, their real role was to scare and exhaust persons seeking asylum in this territory so they would “voluntarily” return to Serbia, thus depriving themselves of asylum.
In several cases, adults, mostly parents, were not given food for days, and in order to be able to eat again, the Hungarian Helsinki Committee had to intervene at the Strasbourg Court.
The first judgment delivered by the Strasbourg Court on October 5 was the one of a Kurdish man who spent eight and a half months in the Tompa transit zone, during which period his mental and physical condition deteriorated.
According to the Helsinki Committee, the eighteen-year-old was also one of those who had been starved after he was not provided with food for six days before Strasbourg ordered the authorities to give him food.
In this case, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the treatment of O.Q by the Hungarian state violated the prohibition of torture or denigrated treatment and punishment. The Court ruled that he was unlawfully detained without legal basis. The Kurdish man was awarded to a just satisfaction of €4,500.
In addition, the European Court of Human Rights also ruled that the Hungarian state unlawfully detained, without legal remedy, an Afghan family of five, which was the second judgment delivered by the Strasbourg Court.
The father and his wife together, with their three children (aged ten, eight and four months), reached the transit zone in Ruse on February 20 in bad condition, while the 100-day imprisonment was particularly hard on the parent struggling with a severe mental illness and the middle child, according to the Helsinki Committee.
The Hungarian state also violated the prohibition of torture or inhuman or degrading treatment and punishment in the case of the Iraqi mother and her four-year-old son, who was detained for four months in the Tompa transit zone in 2017.
According to the Helsinki Committee, the woman fled her country to escape her abusive husband while her child was also struggling with illness. However, they didn’t receive any meaningful medical assistance or treatment in the transit zone. Furthermore, they were not even taken out to the hospital.
The attorney who represented the asylum-seeker clients of the Hungarian Helsinki Committee in all three cases, Barbara Pohárnok, said that it was touching to see how important it is in each of our client’s lives to acknowledge their suffering, their humiliation in order to speak about the injustices, they have experienced.
In these judgments, the Strasbourg Court has for the umpteenth time ruled that the prolonged, inhumane detention of asylum-seekers in transit zones violated fundamental human rights.
The Helsinki Committee said that asylum-seeking children were treated as if they had been criminals, stressing that the real criminal was the Hungarian state.
