DISCRIMINATION – ROMA In January, a court in the capital Budapest instructed the municipality of Miskolc to develop an action plan for the mostly Roma residents who were evicted or facing eviction from the Numbered Streets neighbourhood of the city. However, the housing action plan envisaged only 30 housing units for the approximately 100 families affected, and did not allocate additional funding for housing or compensation. In March, a court in Eger issued a firstinstance verdict that Roma children in Heves County were unlawfully segregated in schools and classes providing education designed for children with special needs. In June, the European Commission initiated infringement proceedings against Hungary for discrimination of Roma in education. Hate crimes The investigation and prosecution of hate crimes continued to lack consistency. In January, the Curia (Supreme Court) finally issued its verdict in the case of the serial killing of Roma people in 2008 and 2009, targeted on the ground of their ethnicity. Six people were killed including a five-year-old boy, and several others were injured. Three defendants were sentenced to life imprisonment without parole (in contravention of European human rights law), and the fourth to 13 years in prison. In April, an appeals court in Debrecen reversed a first instance verdict which had found that police discriminated against Roma in the town of Gyöngyöspata when they failed to protect local Roma residents from far-right groups in 2011. The Hungarian Civil Liberties Union appealed against the decision to the Curia. REFUGEES AND MIGRANTS Hungary continued to severely restrict access to the country for refugees and asylumseekers, criminalizing thousands of people for irregular entry across the border fences put up at its southern border. The government repeatedly extended a “state of 182 emergency due to mass immigration” and, despite plummeting numbers of new arrivals to the country, deployed over 10,000 police and military personnel along the border. Nearly 3,000 people were taken to court and expelled for entering the country irregularly, without a proper examination of their protection needs, by the end of the year. A number of legal amendments enabled the immediate return of all non-citizens caught in an irregular situation at the border or up to 8km inside Hungarian territory, and over 16,000 people were denied entry or were returned forcibly, sometimes violently, to Serbia. On 31 March, the government’s list of “safe countries of origin” and “safe third countries” was expanded to include Turkey. In May, the national assembly passed a set of amendments significantly cutting access to housing, health care and integration programmes for people with protection status. Hungary suspended co-operation with other EU countries and refused to accept asylum-seekers from states participating in the Dublin system. It attempted to return at least 2,500 asylum-seekers already in Hungary to Greece, despite the presumption against returns to Greece in light of systemic shortcomings in the Greek asylum system confirmed by the European Court of Human Rights. Conditions in the Hungarian asylum system prompted a number of other European countries to rule against returning people to Hungary, in some cases recommending the suspension of Dublin transfers altogether. The detention of asylum-seekers incountry continued to be implemented without the necessary safeguards to ensure that it was lawful, necessary and proportional. In June, the European Court of Human Rights found in O.M. v Hungary, that the asylum detention of a gay asylum-seeker was in violation of his right to liberty and safety. The Court ruled that Hungary failed to make an individualized assessment justifying the applicant’s detention and to take into account Amnesty International Report 2016/17