The case concerned the removal of three Syrian nationals from Hungary to Serbia following the rejection of their asylum requests as inadmissible by the Hungarian authorities, which ruled within a few hours of the lodging of asylum applications and considered Serbia to be a “safe third country”. The Szeged Administrative and Labour Court rejected their appeals considering that the applicants had not rebutted the presumption that they had had an opportunity to enjoy effective international protection in Serbia. They alleged that after the court decisions were communicated to them, Hungarian authorities took them out of the Röszke transit zone and made them cross the border back into Serbia without any official arrangement with the Serbian authorities.

The applicants complained under Article 3 of the European Convention that their expulsion to Serbia was the result of a deficient asylum procedure exposing them to “(i) a risk that they would not be allowed access to an asylum procedure in Serbia; (ii) a risk of chain refoulement; and (iii) inadequate reception conditions in Serbia.” They also raised complaints under Article 13 of the Convention in conjunction with Article 3 that the domestic remedies for their asylum request and their expulsion had been ineffective.

The court cited its previous case law in Ilias and Ahmed v Hungary decided in 2019 and noted that although the facts in this case took place six months after those in Ilias and Ahmed, the applicable domestic law and the relevant country reports remained the same. That is, Hungary had failed to discharge its procedural obligation under Article 3 of the Convention as it had not assessed the risk of the applicants’ summary removal, the general legislative presumption that Serbia was a safe third country had not been sufficiently substantiated, and the assessment of the Serbian asylum system did not take into account the findings of the UNHCR according to which asylum-seekers returned to Serbia ran a real risk of not being protected against refoulement to North Macedonia and then to Greece.

The court also noted that the applicants in the present case did not have legal representation during the asylum proceedings and were not heard before the Szeged Administrative and Labour Court, which aggravated the State’s procedural violation of Article 3 of the European Convention. 

Thus, the court concluded that Hungary failed to discharge its procedural obligation under Article 3 of the European Convention to assess the risks of ill treatment before removing the applicants from Hungary. The court did not examine whether Article 3 was breached on account of Hungary’s failure to assess the risk of being denied adequate reception conditions in Serbia.