Steven N.The European Court of Human Rights handed down a verdict today in the case of young asylum-seeking children and their parents, reports 24.hu.
The Strasbourg-based court found that the Hungarian state illegally detained an Afghan family of four for 211 days in the Röszke transit zone in inhumane conditions, denying them the possibility of effective legal remedy, and starving the father. The four asylum seekers were represented by the Hungarian Helsinki Committee.
After a long wait in Serbia, the Hungarian authorities allowed the family into the Röszke transit zone on April 23, 2018, so that they could submit their asylum application there.
The family was forced to flee Afghanistan when the father, who had worked as an interpreter for the U.S. Army, was threatened with death by the Taliban.
The court ruled that detaining the mother, who was struggling with a grave illness, the father, and their small children for seven months in the transit zone, and starving the father qualifies as inhumane and humiliating treatment, and was illegal. As compensation, the court awarded €15,000 (US $14,956) to the family. [Magyar Hang]
Good for the European Court of Human Rights. As Bob Dylan once commented, “you don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing”, which is especially appropriate, given recent regime firing of weather forecaster.
It wasn’t in this article, but other articles on this story pointed out that the children were ages 1 and 3, so their detainment must have been extremely hard on all of them.
Right, Misi! You are one for keeping a positive score and I admire that.
The plight of Afghan refugee families (in Europe) with employment-ties to the Western Allied Forces is a tragic story. They wait indefinetely in facilities and camps. It seems that only human rights organisations and local networks actually help these people in their need for political asylum and assurance that they won’t be sent back into the arms of the Taliban, while most of the responsible politicians just wash their hands. And the legal complications of treating these cases are absurd, beginning with providing “adequate” documentation – If only people could talk together!
Thanks Michael. Sadly, the Afghan refugees -as you commented- are badly treated and not just by the Hungarian regime. Every passing day is further confirmation of evil Taliban rule. The “adequate documentation” issue is especially poignant, as refugees often just escape with the clothes on their back.
In the cases of the Afghan allied employees, the proof of identity constitutes multiple legal complicatitions. Most Afghans were hired in secrecy, with assumed identities and unrecorded family ties, for obvious security reasons. To complicate matters further, European civil courts don’t recognize verbal testimony by military personnel as adequate documentation of identity while military records remain secret, because there are no connections between the military and civil records. In other words, unless administrative military documentation cross-checks with available civil records, there is no case – A contemporary Catch-22.
Ideally the US government should have provided for them to obtain refugee status in the US at the very least. I wonder if this option wasn’t possible for them or they didn’t want to go to the US or something else.
From the beginning, Taliban was organized as a national drug cartel/militia with a political front. That has not changed.