A Hungarian court on Friday sentenced 10 migrants to jail terms for illegally crossing the border during a riot in September 2015, after Hungary built a razorwire fence to seal its frontier with Serbia. It was the first case to come to trial under a law passed days before the incident that made illegal border crossing as part of a rioting crowd punishable by between one and five years in prison.
Nine of the migrants were sentenced to about a year in jail, but were released immediately as their sentences were cut by two-thirds at the judge's discretion and offset by time they had spent in detention since September. One migrant was kept behind bars after receiving a three-year sentence for issuing instructions to rioters through a loudspeaker. Both the prosecutor and defence appealed against the ruling.
Nearly half the more than a million migrants who surged into Europe last year passed through Hungary, often causing chaos at borders and along the main migration routes. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has taken a tough line against migration, and says the European Union risks seeing other member states follow Britain to the exit unless it does the same. The mostly Syrian defendants convicted in Szeged, the capital of Csongrad, were part of a crowd that crossed into Hungary on September 16 as hundreds of migrants forced open the border gate and police responded with water cannon and tear gas. "The court deems them to be a part of the rioting crowd as they took advantage of the lack of control to enter Hungary and the European Union," judge Janos Arany told the court.