EU Court: Hungary Breached Law by Converting Prison Sentences for Migrant‑Smuggling into Deportations

The European Union’s top court ruled Thursday that Hungary breached EU law by automatically converting final prison sentences for migrant-smuggling and facilitation offenses into a separate regime that in practice meant deportation and a ban on returning, instead of serving the custodial term imposed by a court.

In a judgment delivered Oct. 15 in Case C-521/25, Commission v Hungary, the Court of Justice of the European Union upheld a suit brought by the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm. The court said Hungary’s system failed to meet the bloc’s requirement that criminal penalties be effective, dissuasive and proportionate. As CURIA, the court’s press service, put it: “The ‘special reintegration detention’, which in practice amounts to deportation from Hungarian territory and a prohibition on returning there, does not constitute an effective, dissuasive and proportionate penalty.”

The case concerned Hungarian Government Decree No. 148/2023, adopted on April 27, 2023. Under that measure, when a court had imposed a final custodial sentence for the relevant facilitation offense and also ordered expulsion, the prison term was automatically converted into what Hungary called “special reintegration detention.” In that regime, the convicted person had to leave Hungary within 72 hours of release and could not return for the duration of the sentence.

The court said that arrangement was unlawful because the prison sentence was not actually enforced as a prison sentence, while the practical consequence became removal from Hungary plus a temporary re-entry ban. It also objected to the fact that the conversion happened automatically, rather than after an individual assessment of the case. Although CURIA’s press release headline used the phrase “trafficking in human beings,” the legal instruments at issue here concern facilitation of unauthorized entry, transit or residence — in other words, migrant-smuggling or facilitation offenses, not the separate offense of trafficking in human beings.

The scale of the measure also featured in the ruling. The decree remained in force for more than two years before being repealed on Aug. 19, 2025. “The decree was repealed on 19 August 2025 and 2 525 people were subject to the special reintegration detention scheme on the basis of that decree,” CURIA said in Press Release No. 150/26.

The Commission’s case relied on the EU’s so-called Facilitators package, made up of Directive 2002/90/EC and Framework Decision 2002/946/JHA. Those rules require EU member states to criminalize conduct involving the facilitation of unauthorized entry, transit and residence and to provide criminal penalties for it. The Luxembourg-based court also found Hungary in breach because the decree applied even to aggravated forms of the offense that, under EU law, must be punishable by a custodial sentence with a maximum of at least eight years.

This was an infringement case, the procedure the Commission uses to sue a member state it says has failed to comply with EU law. The Commission lodged the action on July 31, 2025, after earlier infringement proceedings. Following Thursday’s ruling, Hungary must comply without delay. If the Commission later concludes that it has not done so, it can bring another case asking the court to impose financial penalties. No immediate public response from the Hungarian government was identified in the source material released with the judgment.