New Legal Solutions in the Hungarian Criminal Law with Reference to the Fight against the Irregular Migration

Abstract

International migration has intensified during the last two decades. Europe has been receiving increasing number of migrants from the developing countries (primarily from the Near-East). The number of the irregular migrants entered the European Union reached unprecedented levels in the last four years. The mentioned phenomenon affected the European Union and the Member States as well. The irregular migration is defined and managed in different ways by the Member States. In 2015, when Hungary was in the centre of the migratory flow, a political decision on taking the necessary criminal measures to stop the irregular migrants was made by the Hungarian Government. The legal response concerned widely the Hungarian legal system. In the centre of the amendment were the criminal law and the criminal procedure law. Within the frame of the mentioned decision the Hungarian Criminal Code was amended with three new crimes which are the followings: damaging the border barrier, unlawful crossing the border barrier and obstruction of the construction work on border barrier. The above-mentioned amendment modified the general section of the Criminal Code as well concerning the irregular migration. The aim of the paper is to present on the one hand the solution of the Hungarian criminal law with special reference to the new statutory definitions using the analytical method and on the other hand the data of the Hungarian criminal-statistics as well. However, it shall be underlined that in our paper we could work only with the offical criminal-statistics for 2015-2017 because until the finishing of our study the Unified Hungarian Criminal Statistic of the Investigation Authorities and Prosecution did not summarize yet the data concerns the year of 2018.