World News | Hungarian Court Declines Challenge to Primacy of EU Law

Budapest, Dec 10 (AP) Hungary's Constitutional Court on Friday declined to rule on a motion challenging the primacy of European Union law in a case involving the country's treatment of refugees and asylum-seekers.

The decision came after Justice Minister Judit Varga challenged a ruling last December from the EU's top court which found Hungary had failed to respect EU law by conducting pushbacks of people entering the country without authorisation, denying them the right to apply for asylum and detaining them in “transit zones” along the southern border with Serbia.

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Hungary's government, led by right-wing Prime Minister Viktor Orban, has engaged in frequent conflicts with the EU over immigration. In 2015, Hungary refused to participate in an EU scheme to settle hundreds of thousands of refugees across the bloc's 27 member nations, and erected a razor wire fence across its southern border to keep migrants out.

In her motion, Varga asked the court to rule that the Court of Justice of the European Union's (CJEU) decision requiring that migrants be granted the opportunity to apply for asylum was incompatible with Hungary's constitution.

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It was a challenge to the primacy of EU law that echoed an October ruling from a court in Poland. That caused a crisis in the EU when the court declared that the Polish constitution took precedence over some of the bloc's treaties.

In its Friday ruling, the Hungarian court stressed that the interpretation of Hungary's constitution “cannot be aimed at reviewing the judgment of the CJEU, nor does the Constitutional Court's procedure in the present case, by its very nature, extend to the review of the primacy of EU law.”

Orban is facing an election next spring which is expected to be the most serious challenge to his power since he was elected in 2010. He has portrayed immigration as a civilisational threat to Europe, and is campaigning as a defender of national interests against unfair dictates from Brussels.

In a statement released on its website, human rights organization Hungarian Helsinki Committee wrote that the government had no green light to continue ignoring the EU ruling.

“Continuing the sabre rattling miscarriage of justice will have serious human rights and financial consequences,” it said. (AP)

(The above story is verified and authored by Press Trust of India (PTI) staff. PTI, India’s premier news agency, employs more than 400 journalists and 500 stringers to cover almost every district and small town in India.. The views appearing in the above post do not reflect the opinions of LatestLY)