Hungary misses deadline for aligning asylum law with EU legislation, while second deadline for paying €200 million fine expires on Tuesday

The Hungarian government has failed to present its plan for how it intends to comply with EU asylum law, thus missing the deadline which was set for midnight last Friday, Anitta Hipper confirmed to Euronews on Monday. The spokeswoman for the European Commission had previously acknowledged that the Hungarian authorities were in contact with them.

The European Court of Justice fined the Hungarian government for failing to comply with EU asylum rules in a years-long case on 13 June. The panel justified the decision by stating that the Hungarian government's failure to comply, "which amounts to a deliberate circumvention of the application of a common EU policy as a whole, constitutes an unprecedented and very serious breach of EU law" and "shifts responsibility" to other member states.

The court imposed a fine of €1 million a day and the Hungarian government had three months to inform the European Commission about how it would bring Hungarian legislation in line with the EU's asylum regulations. If it failed to do so or failed to provide a satisfactory response, the fine can be applied retroactively (which means we are now at nearly €100 million, or more than HUF 36 billion at current exchange rates), and the fine will keep increasing by €1 million a day.

Hipper did not give a definitive answer as to what will happen if the government continues to drag this out indefinitely, but her colleague Balázs Ujvári said that following a 45-day and then a 15-day notice, the fines could simply be deducted from the funding set aside for the member state in question.

The spokesperson also cited a previous similar case involving Poland. He did not elaborate, but in 2021 the Poles also received a fine of one million euros per day due to the changes in their judicial system. The government then halved the daily amount of the fine by introducing a reform, and in 2023 the controversial system failed, by which time their bill had already exceeded half a billion euros.

The deadline for paying the €200 million fine is on Tuesday

In addition to the daily fine, the court also imposed a one-off fine of €200 million on the Hungarian government. The deadline set in the second notice on this expires today, 17 September, so if it is not paid, from here on it can be automatically deducted from the EU funds that Hungary is entitled to receive.

The European Commission has already made it clear that under the court's decision and because of the EU regulations, there is no way the Hungarian government can evade this (at most it could have paid it earlier). Following the meeting of EU affairs ministers in Budapest in early September, Hungarian Minister of EU Affairs, János Bóka said that whether the government would pay the fine or receive reduced payments was a technical, rather than a political question, "and there have been instances of both".