“Even of the system for distributing asylum-seekers among EU member states according to a quota were to be realised, the consistent application of the system would result in an unlawful situation”, the Ministry of Justice’s Parliamentary State Secretary, Pál Völner said on Hungarian M1 television’s Thursday morning current affairs program.
The Minister of State was interviewed with relation to the fact that the Court of Justice of the European Union began hearing the quota case on Wednesday.
Mr. Völner said the Hungarian case is mainly based on procedural errors. According to the Hungarian standpoint, the Council resolution on establishing the distribution mechanism must be regarded as legislation in view of the fact that it determines an obligation for Member States, and failure to fulfil those obligations is sanctioned.
“However, EU legislation has its own rules and procedures, which were not kept to: the Council could only have modified the submitted Commission proposal in the case of a unanimous vote, but this was not the case. In addition, the document should have been forwarded to the European Parliament for further opinion, and the opinion of national parliaments should also have been consulted”, Mr. Völner said, listing the discrepancies.
“The Hungarian submission also includes a substantive objection concerning whether the measure conforms to the principle of necessity and proportionality, because the goal can only be achieved in this manner”, he added.
The Minister of State also said that even if the mandatory resettlement quota were to come into force, it would be impossible to implement it in view of the fact that there exists the free movement of people within the Schengen Area and nothing guarantees that asylum-seekers will remain in the country to which they are sent. “I don’t know under what laws and what duress they could be sent back, what instruments could be applied to keep them there and what treaties and regulations that would infringe upon”, he continued.
The Geneva Convention already questions whether “people can be distributed, like at a human market”, meaning that adhering to and enforcing the regulation would result in an unlawful situation, he said.
The Hungarian Government turned to the European Court of Justice in 2015, asking for the annulment of the mandatory mechanism aimed at the resettlement of 120 thousand asylum-seekers, which the EU’s Interior Ministers had adopted a few months earlier with a qualified majority vote, despite protests from Hungary. Slovakia has initiated legal action with the Court for similar reasons.