Update from June 2022:
In 2020, according to the National Directorate-General for Alien Policing (NDGAP), 5 people applied for recognition as stateless, 4 people were recognised as stateless, and 8 applications were rejected. On 31 December 2020, there were 16 stateless people residing in Hungary with humanitarian residence permits, 12 with refugee and subsidiary protection status, 42 with 'national' permanent residence permits and 5 with 'EC' permanent residence permits (which permits free movement in the EU). Also in 2020, 9 stateless people applied for naturalisation, 5 were naturalised, and 2 applications were refused. UNHCR reports 147 people under its statelessness mandate in Hungary in 2020, an increase from 76 people in 2019. There are no records of immigration detention being ordered against any stateless person or of stateless people being effectively deported in 2020.
The Hungarian Helsinki Committee successfully challenged through litigation a practice by the authorities of rejecting applications from stateless Palestinians on the grounds that Palestine is recognised as a State by the United Nations. The Supreme Court held that only the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade has competence on this matter, and the Ministry declared in March 2020 that Hungary did not recognise Palestine as a State, in particular because of Israel’s control over the issuance of identity documents. The NDGAP’s practice now suggests that people with a Palestinian passport issued under Israeli control can be regarded as Palestinian nationals, while others can be recognised as stateless persons. It remains to be seen how this practice will develop.
In a judgment from 2021, the Hungarian Constitutional Court found that it is not unconstitutional to reject applications for statelessness status from applicants who are considered to be a threat to national security, despite efforts made by the Hungarian Helsinki Committee through strategic litigation to argue that such exclusion goes beyond the 1954 Convention.
In February 2020, the time during which Hungarian nationality may not be withdrawn increased from 10 to 20 years from the date that nationality was granted.
Admission and protection of stateless people and people at risk of statelessness fleeing the war in Ukraine to Hungary are limited, as most stateless persons who have not been granted statelessness status in Ukraine are not able to access temporary protection or asylum. It is also reported that some children born in Hungary to parents fleeing the war in Ukraine are registered as having ‘unknown nationality’ on their birth certificates, which leads to a risk of statelessness.
New resources on Hungary now available include:
- 2021 Statelessness Index Survey
- Country briefing on access to protection for stateless refugees from Ukraine in Hungary (in English, Ukrainian and Russian)
- Joint submission to the UN Universal Periodic Review on Hungary (March 2021)
- Supreme Court judgment on the question of recognition of Palestine as a State (Kfv.II.38.067/2018/6 of 13 November 2019), which can be found on this database
- Constitutional Court, Resolution 14/2021 (IV.23.) of the Constitutional Court on determining the constitutional compliance of Section 78. § (1) c) of Act II of 2007 on the conditions of Entry and Stay of Third-Country Nationals
- ENS Blog, ‘Awaiting’ – Stateless lives in Hungary (March 2021)
Hungary is one of few countries to have acceded to all four of the core statelessness conventions. Although this has translated into some positive law, policy and practice at national level, there remain some significant gaps and the stateless population has never been comprehensively mapped. A statelessness determination procedure is established in law, and access, assessment, procedural protections and appeal rights under the procedure are generally positive. However, the definition of a stateless person in national law is narrower than the 1954 Convention, an application may be refused on national security grounds, applicants under the procedure lack protection from detention and removal, and the law provides only limited rights to people recognised as stateless. Access to nationality, although provided for in law, is very difficult to acquire in practice leaving most stateless people in the country unable to acquire a nationality even in the long term.
There are limited protections against the arbitrary detention of stateless people in Hungary and what limited procedural safeguards are in place have been deemed insufficient by various national and international actors. Safeguards exist in nationality law to prevent statelessness in the case of foundlings and children born abroad to Hungarian nationals. However, there are only partial safeguards to prevent children from being born stateless on the territory, adopted children may be stateless unless and until they acquire nationality through naturalisation, and, although births will be registered regardless of parents’ residence status, officials will register a child as having ‘unknown nationality’ unless this can be proven otherwise, causing significant problems for children later in life.
Information below by theme was last updated in March 2021.
Gábor Gyulai, Hungarian Helsinki Committee
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