The Loss of Face for Everyone Concerned: EU Rule of Law in the Context of the ‘Migration Crisis’

Abstract

No winners emerge out of a consideration of the two key EU crises side-by-side: the ‘migration crisis’ – steady attempts by the EU and its Member States to switch off the effective enjoyment of the right to asylum already truncated by the Dublin system and national law – and the ‘rule of law crisis’, seeing Member States leave the club of functioning liberal democracies and pushing the Union in the direction of an association not based on particular values and harboring autocracies with destroyed checks and balances. Hungary is deployed as a case-study next to the EU itself to assess how the two ‘crises’ feed and amplify each other and which lessons emerge from the connection between them for the EU’s future. The conclusion is that everyone is losing face, since EU law, just like Hungarian law, is unable to ensure the safeguarding of asylum seekers’ rights by design. Moreover, recent ‘improvements’, from the EU-Turkey deal to the Hungarian policy of populist hate, showcase the feebleness of values and rampant double standards in a landscape of wanting legal remedies and empty proclamations of rights and principles. While the failed neighborhood policy and empty European values deliver thousands of dead in the Mediterranean, ‘illiberal’ Hungary and ‘value-based’ EU emerge as successful powerhouses of othering, hypocrisy and wanting legality, where double standards reign and scapegoating migration, especially ‘non-Western’ migration – up to the point of leaving thousands of people dead – brings steady political dividends.