The European Court on Wednesday rejected suit of Hungary and Slovakia demanding to cancel mandatory national quotas for the EU member states to resettle refugees, RIA Novosti reported to the press service of the court.
“The court rejected the lawsuits,” the source said.
The attorney general of the Court of the EU, whose position is taken into account in the court’s decision, previously recommended that the claims of Budapest and Bratislava be rejected against the decision of the EU Council to resettle the refugees in Italy and Greece across the European Union.
Hungary and Slovakia challenged the decision of September 22, 2015, which obliges EU members to accept 120,000 refugees arriving in Greece and Italy, in order to reduce migration pressure on these two states. Against this decision voted Hungary, Romania, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, Finland abstained. In support of the position of Hungary and Slovakia during the proceedings, Poland acted, while Belgium, Germany, Greece, Italy, Luxembourg, France, Sweden and the European Commission supported the EU Council.
Slovakia and Hungary justified their claim by the fact that, in their opinion, the decision to move refugees was taken with violations of established procedures and could not help resolve the migration crisis. In turn, the general counsel stated that the decision of the EU Council can not be considered a legislative act, as the plaintiffs insist, since it was justifiably accepted on the basis of Article 78 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. Including, as they say in the conclusions of the attorney general, the procedure for adopting this decision does not involve consultations with the parliaments of the EU member states.
The attorney general also argued that the provisional nature of this decision is obvious, since the time frame for its application is supposed to be the text of the document – from September 25, 2015 to September 26, 2017. According to the lawyer, the adoption of this decision does not contradict the position of the EU summit of June 25-26, 2015 on the need to agree on the distribution of refugees on the basis of consensus. The General Counsel believes that the summit was referring to refugees who arrived from 2014 to the first months of 2015, the resettlement of which was listed in another decision of the EU Council – the decision of September 14, 2015 on the distribution of 40,000 refugees.