caa a22 4500 397580851 CHVBK 20180308164906.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161202e199610 xx s 000 0 eng 10.1093/ijrl/8.4.499 doi (NATIONALLICENCE)oxford-10.1093/ijrl/8.4.499 FULLERTON MARYELLEN Brooklyn Law School. The author wishes to thank the German Marshall Fund of the United States for the fellowship that enabled this research to be undertaken and Brooklyn Law School for the grand that supported the transformation of the data collected into written form. The fieldwork was done during the 1994-95 academic year and this article depicts the evolving refugee situation in Hungary at that time. Hungary, Refugees, and the Law of Return [Elektronische Daten] [MARYELLEN FULLERTON] In the past decade Hungary has transformed itself from a refugee producing country into a refugee receiving country. Between 1948 and 1988 only a few thousand refugees came to Hungary. Suddenly, near the end of the 1980s, thousands more sought refuge in Hungary. By mid-1991 more than 50,000 refugees from Romania had entered Hungary. In the last six months of 1991 another 50,000 refugees entered Hungary, most of whom came from former Yugoslavia. More came in the subsequent years. From 1988 throught 1995 Hungary registered more than 130,000 refugees, and many more may have entered Hungary without formally requesting asylum. REfugees who came to Hungary entered a country with an undeveloped refugee policy and a patchwork of legislation and government decrees concerning refugees and migrants. The government's attempt to establish a modern refugee system based on this rudimentary framework has been distorted by a powerful preference for protecting refugees of Hungarian ancestry. This preference permeates the laws and the administration of the refugee system. Although the law is written in neutral terms, the realit of refugee status in Hungary is that it is largely reserved for ethnic Hungarians. Other asylum seekers are rejected or shunted into temporary protection status. In effect, the refugee law functions as a Law of REturn. This distortion of the refugee system to accomplish an immigration goal has multiple negative effects. It leads to the rejection of legitimate non-Hungarian refugees. It encourages the acceptance of ethnic Hungarians who are not refugees. It misleads international donors and misallocates the ever-dwindling resources devoted to refugees. It undermines the rule of law in a country struggling to establish it. Only by applying its refugee law impartially to all asylum seekers, no matter what their ethnic heritage, can Hungary live up to its international oligations and create confidence in the soundness of its refugee policy. © Oxford University Press ARTICLES nationallicence International Journal of Refugee Law Oxford University Press 8/4(1996-10), 499-531 0953-8186 8:4<499 1996 8 reflaw https://doi.org/10.1093/ijrl/8.4.499 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1093/ijrl/8.4.499 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- FULLERTON MARYELLEN Brooklyn Law School. The author wishes to thank the German Marshall Fund of the United States for the fellowship that enabled this research to be undertaken and Brooklyn Law School for the grand that supported the transformation of the data collected into written form. The fieldwork was done during the 1994-95 academic year and this article depicts the evolving refugee situation in Hungary at that time NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- International Journal of Refugee Law Oxford University Press 8/4(1996-10), 499-531 0953-8186 8:4<499 1996 8 reflaw Metadata rights reserved CC BY-NC-4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-oxford