Impact of the Temporary Security Border Barrier on Police Activities in the Field of Policing and Detaining Aliens
Impact of the Temporary Security Border Barrier on Police Activities in the Field of Policing and Detaining Aliens

Summary/Abstract: The 2015 migration crisis saw an unprecedented number of refugees entering the European Union. Most of them had the primary purpose of seeking asylum in one of the developed Western European countries and then staying in these countries fora longer or shorter period. Since then, their presence has become a constant presence on the Western Balkan migration route. In manyways, the ‘refugee crisis’ is now part of ‘normality’ in the Balkans — the presence of asylum seekers is not perceived and treated as an emergency, as was the case with the mass migration wave of 2015–2016, but rather as a structural element inherent to thepeninsula’s geographical location.1 The migration crisis has affected Hungary, on the Western Balkan route, only as a transit country,but it has still posed a major challenge for the domestic authorities, causing significant organisational changes. The aim of the Hungarian authorities was to prevent irregular migrants from crossing the country on their way to Western Europe. The large numbers of refugees arriving in a short period of time posed a major challenge to the Hungarian law enforcement agencies. In particular, the implementation of the necessary immigration control tasks was a major problem. Due to the extremely high number of illegal border crossings in a short period of time, a physical border barrier was set up in 2015 along the Hungarian-Serbian border and later alongthe Hungarian-Croatian border, and damaging this barrier and crossing it without authorisation were criminalised. What has been the impact of the measures introduced, and how have they affected police activities in the field of policing aliens, in particular the restriction of personal liberty through detention? How did the changes in procedures work and what impact did they have on illegal migration?

• Details
• Contents