The Loss of Face for Everyone Concerned: EU Rule of Law in the Context of the ‘Migration Crisis’

No winners emerge out of a consideration of the two key EU crises side-by-side:
the ‘migration crisis’ – steady attempts by the EU and its Member States to
switch off the effective enjoyment of the right to asylum already truncated by
the Dublin system and national law – and the ‘rule of law crisis’, seeing Member
States leave the club of functioning liberal democracies and pushing the Union
in the direction of an association not based on particular values and harbouring
autocracies with destroyed checks and balances. Hungary is deployed as a casestudy next to the EU itself to assess how the two ‘crises’ feed and amplify each
other and which lessons emerge from the connection between them for the
EU’s future. The conclusion is that everyone is losing face, since EU law, just like
Hungarian law, is unable to ensure the safeguarding of asylum seekers’ rights by
design. Moreover, recent ‘improvements’, from the EU-Turkey deal to the
Hungarian policy of populist hate, showcase the feebleness of values and
rampant double standards in a landscape of wanting legal remedies and empty
proclamations of rights and principles. While the failed neighbourhood policy
and empty European values deliver thousands of dead in the Mediterranean,
‘illiberal’ Hungary and ‘value-based’ EU emerge as successful powerhouses of
othering, hypocracy and wanting legality, where double standards reign and
scapegoating migration, especially ‘non-Western’ migration – up to the point of
leaving thousands of people dead – brings steady political dividends.