Case summaries

While accepting that Hungary is the responsible EU State for processing the applicant's asylum application (Article 18(1) Dublin Regulation III), the Court held that  a transfer to Hungary may not occur due to systemic flaws in the asylum procedure and reception conditions in Hungary,  that would  put the applicant at a serious risk of suffering inhuman or degrading treatment within the meaning of Article 4 Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (CFR) and Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) (Article 3 para 2 Dublin III) .

The Returns Directive does not preclude domestic legislation which provides for a prison sentence as a criminal law penalty for non-EU citizens who unlawfully re-enter the country in breach of an entry ban.

The Court ruled that when deciding whether the subsequent application is admissible, new facts regarding the individual situation of the applicant or her situation in the country of origin as well as change in the situation of the country of origin alone are significant. When examining whether the grounds of the first and the subsequent application are the same, the essence of the facts is important, not the manner in which they are presented.

With regard to the applicant’s argument that in the present case the legal grounds for granting subsidiary protection were not examined, the Court stated that in the decision on discontinuing the procedure because of inadmissibility of the application, the authorities do not rule on refusal of refugee status, therefore there is no self-standing legal basis to examine the grounds for granting subsidiary protection. The present application, as the inadmissible one, could not have led to the in-merit examination of the grounds for granting refugee status and therefore could not have included the examination of the subsidiary protection grounds.  

The appeal against the transfer of an asylum seeker from Germany to Hungary in the accelerated Dublin procedure is granted and suspensive effect applied to the decision. The applicant may face a risk of inhuman or degrading treatment because of systemic deficiencies in the asylum procedure and reception conditions in Hungary following the entry into force of new Hungarian laws on 1 August 2015, and because of the risk of further removal to Serbia.

The Austrian asylum authorities have to consider accurately and comprehensively the changes in the legal situation and the development of the actual situation of asylum seekers in Hungary when deciding on a Dublin transfer to this country.

The applicant, an Iranian national, had fled Iran in light of the risks he faced there as a political dissident, and had been detained in Greece with a view to being expelled to Iran. The Court held that the Greek authorities had violated Articles 3 concerning his conditions of detention, 3 and 13 combined because of the lack of an effective remedy to complain about these conditions, the failings of the asylum procedure and the risk of being sent back to Iran, and 5(4) with respect to the inefficient judicial review of the detention.

The Court of Appeal upheld the High Court’s judgment in reaffirming that the procedural rules governing an appeal against a negative decision on asylum conducted under the Detained Fast Track (DFT) system are ultra vires and thus unlawful.

A lack of attention paid to the vulnerability of the applicants as asylum seekers and children and their subsequent exposure to conditions of extreme poverty outside the State reception system has led to a violation of Article 3 of the Convention.

The procedure of requesting the suspensive effect of a decision rejecting an asylum application and ordering the transfer of an applicant to another Member State does not amount to an effective remedy under the Convention. 

This is an application for judicial review of a decision made by the defendant local authority assessing the claimant to be an adult. The court reviewed important evidence such as the initial age assessment, together with statements from claimant’s supporting witnesses and the errors of the Italian authorities’ recordkeeping and concluded that the appellant was in fact a minor.

A span of more than three-years between the filing of the appeal against the expulsion order and the original scheduling of the initial oral hearing of such appeal violated a plaintiff’s right to a trial without undue delays, in accordance with the criteria identified by the Spanish Constitutional Court in its settled case-law for determining whether a procedural delay is undue. These criteria consider, among others, the complexity of the case, the average duration of similar proceedings and the nature of the plaintiff’s interest at stake.