Hungary will scrap border transit zones where asylum seekers were held while authorities reviewed their applications after a European court ruling that deemed the practice unlawful, Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s chief of staff said on Thursday.
The European Union’s top court ruled last Thursday that four asylum seekers stuck in a transit zone on the Hungarian-Serbian border had effectively been detained and that a local court should release them immediately.
The Court of Justice was reviewing the case of two Afghan and two Iranian nationals who arrived in Hungary from Serbia in late 2018 and early 2019 and applied for asylum from the Hungarian Röszke transit zone on the Serbian-Hungarian border.
Once the transit zones are scrapped, asylum requests can only be submitted at Hungarian embassies and consulates, Gulyas said.
During the peak of the migration crisis in 2015, Orban effectively sealed Hungary’s southern border with a fence. Hungary was a transit route for hundreds of thousands of migrants heading through the Balkans to Western Europe.