On Tuesday 2 November, the Council of Europe’s committee for the prevention of torture and inhuman, degrading treatment or punishment (CPT) published a report criticising aspects of the Hungarian government’s approach to managing the refugee crisis.
Based on a visit in 2015, the document starts by welcoming the Hungarian authorities’ collaboration and says that most detained foreigners who were interviewed said they were being properly treated. It points out, however, a number of shortcomings and unwise choices for managing the refugee crisis.
The shortcomings are related to abusive language, disrespectful behaviour, physical brutality and inappropriate conditions in some detention centres. The report focuses on incidents at Nagyfa prison near the Serb border on 23 October 2015, where prisoners complaining of bad treatment barricaded themselves in two rooms after damaging equipment. The CPT calls for an independent investigation of what happened.
The CPT says that Hungary was facing "unusual circumstances" with the arrival of nearly 10,000 people a day in the summer of 2015, but it needs to treat detained foreigners with dignity under amended legislation that makes crossing an external border or damaging a border a criminal offence. The Hungarian authorities are therefore asked to publish a statement telling police officers and armed guards working in asylum and detention centres that no kind of bad treatment will be tolerated.
This was rejected by the Hungarian authorities in a statement published simultaneously with the report and saying that the report gives a "false and negative" image. The Hungarian government says that an official statement of this nature is not needed to explain to police forces that they have to comply with the requirements of fundamental rights and that any violation will lead to penalties. (Original version in French by Véronique Leblanc)