Efficiency in Protection of Rights and Frontiers

Hungarian Law and Practice of External Borders Control

Abstract

Migration of human beings was always an essential activity, a permanent part and changing factor of civilisations. As such, particularly in Europe, migration is to be considered as an activity comprising switching between locations and shifting between historical periods. Moreover, these movements of people have been an important factor of cultural enrichment for all the new periods of European civilisation. However, with the formation of nation-states an important change, at least from a legal and political viewpoint, was revealed: as much as individual rights of persons acquired a constitutional importance, the protection of the state and the nation that is defined also with cultural characteristics became a state-aim: fundamental rights of people should be protected as well as public policy should be maintained and national security safeguarded. Moreover, human rights’ protection became increasingly important at a supranational level, and because of the achievement of the Schengen zone, the regulation on the movement of people became a shared competence between the European Union and its Member States. For a country, such as Hungary, having a rich, sometimes tragical historical experience of the protection of its borders that are also first frontiers of Western Europe, in times of globalisation, also with regards to its sovereignty, several questions were raised and discussed for the adoption of legal regulation in application nowadays. Hungary challenged supranational law on the abstract matter of fundamental rights of migrants and on the EU-rules defined by directives in a field of shared competences. When presenting Hungarian regulation, it is to be examined how a special equilibrium can be achieved between rights and state-aims, supranational and national law, a phenomenon of globalisation and the preservation of national sovereignty.