In 2018, the Hungarian Parliament amended the Fundamental Law, which, among others, contains the principle of non-refoulement, and stipulated at constitutional level that “a non-Hungarian national shall not be entitled to asylum if he or she arrived in the territory of Hungary through any country where he or she was not persecuted or directly threatened with persecution.” Partly due to this new provision of the Fundamental Law and partly based on other Hungarian laws, the European Commission initiated an infringement procedure against Hungary. According to the Hungarian Government, in this procedure the Commission misinterprets the Fundamental Law, therefore (inter alia) the authentic interpretation of this provision was requested from the Constitutional Court. In its Decision No. 2/2019. (III. 5.) AB, the Constitutional Court did not only interpret the provision in question, but it also elaborated on certain matters regarding its own competence in relation to EU law, as well as making relevant findings also in relation to Hungary’s constitution and the interpretation thereof in accordance with the EU law, based on the doctrine of ‘constitutional dialogue’. In this paper, I analyze this decision of the Constitutional Court in detail.

The judgment of the Grand Chamber of the ECtHR in Ilias and Ahmed v. Hungary reflected a big turn of the ECtHR towards a practical and realistic approach. Although the Grand Chamber found that Hungary by choosing to use inadmissibility grounds and expel the applicants to Serbia failed to carry out a thorough assessment of the Serbian asylum system, including the risk of summary removal, contrary to the Chamber it found that a confinement of 23 days in 2015 did not constitute a de facto deprivation of liberty. This paradigm shift is already visible in further decisions of the Court, and it could even serve as a basis for a new direction when reforming the Common European Asylum System.