SYMBOLIC CRIMINAL LEGAL TOOLS IN THE HUNGARIAN FIGHT AGAINST IRREGULAR MIGRATION
SYMBOLIC CRIMINAL LEGAL TOOLS IN THE HUNGARIAN FIGHT AGAINST IRREGULAR MIGRATION

Summary/Abstract: In the 21st century countries worldwide have had to face new security challenges. The fight against terrorism, the pandemic, migratory pressure and other issues, and furthermore political circumstances all over the world have spurred internal legislators to pursue more active legislation. In many cases, legislation has become symbolic and statutory definitions had been adopted and inserted into the system of the substantive criminal law that have caused serious concerns not only for theory but also for practice. There has been an increase in the number of crimes which are regulated by the internal criminal codes but either did not appear in the criminal statistics or turned up only at extremely low levels. Similar legislation can be seen in 2015 in Hungary, when the government decided on stopping irregular migratory flow by using criminal legal tools. Three new elements of crime analysed by the paper were inserted into the Hungarian Criminal Code whose application has only reached low levels in the last six years. These crimes are called “crimes against the border barrier” in the Hungarian criminal law, are the following: unlawful crossing of the border barrier, damaging the border barrier and obstruction of construction work on the border barrier. The aim of the paper is to present the legal situation and its anomalies as an example of symbolic criminal law

• Details
• Contents