Asylum-seeking youth starved and unlawfully detained

H. L. and his family fled Iraq. Unfortunately for him, he was just coming of age: he turned 19, therefore, he was separated from his parents and siblings in the transit zone. His asylum application was rejected twice and he was placed in detention, 306 days of which he was held in the Tompa transit zone.
One of the most repugnant practices of illegal transit detention was that adults in the immigration detention sector of the transit zones were not given food by Immigration and Asylum Office (now called National Directorate-General for Aliens Policing). The young Iraqi man was also starved for eight days and was only given food by his captors after the Strasbourg Court, through the intervention of the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, called on the Hungarian state to do so. Until then, his younger siblings gave him some of their rations.

H. L. was detained in particularly harsh conditions. He was placed in a container and he was not allowed to leave the detention area assigned to him for any reason unless accompanied by armed police or security guards. Neither the workers of the UN Refugee Agency nor charity workers were allowed to enter this area. His captors did everything possible to make him give up and “leave voluntarily” for Serbia. Perhaps this would have happened sooner or later, if the government had not been forced to close the transit zones on 21 May 2020, following the ruling of the European Court of Justice. Only then was H. L. released, and since then he has been living in Austria.

The young man has taken his case to the European Court of Human Rights with the help of the Hungarian Helsinki Committee for the harm he suffered at the hands of the state. Last week, the Strasbourg court ruled that the Hungarian state has committed a breach of the law, because no one shall be subjected to torture or inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, in particular starvation. The Strasbourg judges therefore ordered the Hungarian state to pay a total of €3,000 in just reparation.

“After five years, our client has received redress. Thousands of people in transit zones have been victims of state arbitrariness. The transit zones have since been dismantled, but asylum seekers are paying a high price: those who do not come from Ukraine are no longer allowed to enter the country. We are working to put an end to the often violent pushbacks.” – Róbert Miskolczi, the lawyer of the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, who represented the asylum seeker in the Strasbourg proceedings, assessed last week’s ruling.