European Court of Justice has rejected a challenge brought by Hungary and Slovakia against the European Union’s power to force member states to admit asylum seekers from Italy and Greece, in accordance with the predefined quota envisaging these two countries to admit total of 2.196 refugees. In their case before the ECJ, Hungary and Slovakia argued that there had been procedural flaws, one of which is not consulting European Parliament in the decision making process, and that the decision was neither a suitable response to the migrant crisis nor necessary to deal with it. In the procedure before the Court, Hungary and Slovakia were supported by Poland, whereas Belgium, Germany, Greece, France, Italy, Luxembourg, Sweden and the European Commission argued in support of the Council.
In a decision made on September 6, 2017 the Court rejected the argument that the European Parliament was to be consulted, with the participation of national parliaments and the public nature of deliberations, stating that the provisional measure could be adopted in non-legislative procedure. In addition, the Court ruled that provisional measures cab derogate from legislative acts as long as their material and temporal scope is circumscribed. The Court was satisfied that the European Parliament was duly informed of the amendments to the initial proposal prior to the adoption of the final version, without the need for a vote at the Parliament’s plenary. With this decision, the Court rejected all pleas related to the proportionality and necessity of this provisional measure, arguing that the mechanism actually contributed to enabling Greece and Italy to deal with the impact of so-called migration crisis.
Relocation plan presented by the Council two years ago envisaged quotas for all Member States for admitting refugees residing on the territories of Greece and Italy. According to the European Commission data, by September 13, 2017 out of 98,255 planned, only 28,191 refugees were relocated – 19,670 from Greece and 8,521 from Italy. Hungary, Austria and Poland were strong opponents to the relocation plan from the beginning, whereas Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Slovakia and Croatia formally pledged only limited number of places for refugees.