Hungary releases convicted foreign human smugglers: Austria outraged

The Hungarian state only asks these people to leave the country in 72 hours. The reason is that they are foreigners, and their detention costs a fortune for the state budget.

According to 24.hu, not everybody is happy with the Hungarian government’s latest decision concerning foreign human smugglers arrested and convicted in Hungary. Some are even members of organised crime groups, but the Hungarian police do not care. They even take them from the prison to a nearby train station to release them. But nobody checks whether they get on the train or not.

That is kind of an amnesty since these people will probably vanish instead of returning home and going to jail. That is because the Hungarian state does not monitor whether these people leave Hungary and return to their home country to serve their sentence there.

However, Austria is not happy. Interior Minister Gerhard Karner, for example, would like to introduce countermeasures. Austria believes Hungary releases people who endangered and will probably endanger human lives. Now there are more than 2,600 human smugglers in Hungarian prisons (13 percent of the altogether number of convicts). The vast majority of them are foreign nationals.

Átlátszó wrote in an article in March that the Hungarian prisons are overcrowded. Therefore, the police replaced more than 1,000 convicts only in January. Interestingly, Hungarian nationals do not receive that relief even though they are sentenced for the same crimes.

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