Top EU court fines Hungary $216 mn for flouting asylum law

Brussels: The European Union’s top court ordered Hungary to pay a fine of 200 million euros ($216 million) on Thursday for persistently breaking the bloc’s asylum rules despite a previous European Court of Justice ruling, plus an additional 1 million euros for every day it fails to comply going forward.

Hungary had not implemented a 2020 ruling from top EU judges in Luxembourg, the ECJ wrote in a press release. “That failure, which consists in deliberately avoiding the application of a common EU policy as a whole, constitutes an unprecedented and extremely serious infringement of EU law.”