EU judges balk at Hungarian deal freeing migrant smugglers

Filed 41m ago · Via Courthouse News · The Buffoon Desk

THIS STORY IS SCORED

Machinations

Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: bahniuk · CC BY 3.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

Hungary let 2,525 convicted migrant smugglers trade prison time for a 72-hour deadline to leave the country, a scheme the EU's top court ruled illegal on Thursday. The Court of Justice found the penalties neither worked in practice nor matched the seriousness of crimes that under EU law could carry sentences of eight years or more.

Hungary introduced the releases by emergency decree in 2023, citing prison overcrowding and costs linked to the Ukraine war, though a Hungarian law professor noted overcrowding has nothing obvious to do with that war. Austria, alarmed enough to summon Hungary's ambassador, tightened its own border controls in response.

The ruling doesn't reopen finished cases or order anyone rearrested; a Hungarian legal scholar called its effect mainly political and precedential. Hungary repealed the original decree in August, folding similar measures into statutory law anyway, and must now pay legal costs or risk financial penalties down the line.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

You can tell a government is proud of a policy when it waits for the courts to find out about it secondhand. Hungary built a fence to keep people out and then built a side door to let the people who smuggled them in walk out free, and called it fiscal responsibility. The judges didn't even reach the question of whether an emergency decree about a war two countries away can excuse a parole program for profiteering criminals, because they didn't have to. That's the kind of case where losing on a technicality is still losing big.

Source: Read the original at Courthouse News → Scored: Machinations · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0