New York Times | 14.03.2017

BUDAPEST — Dozens of people seeking asylum in Hungary continued their hunger strike for a second day on Tuesday, demanding to be released from detention, the authorities said.

The protest coincided with a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights in favor of two refugees from Bangladesh seeking asylum who were found to have been detained and deported illegally by Hungary in 2015.

The 80 detainees on a hunger strike are part of a group of 102 people, mostly from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Syria, being held at a closed reception center in Bekescsaba, a city in southeastern Hungary.

Images broadcast on Hungarian state television showed some of those inside the reception center holding a sheet saying “We are refugees, we are not terrorists” through a barred window.

Hungary’s Office of Immigration and Asylum said in a statement that it had expanded medical services because of the hunger strike, with social workers and armed security guards monitoring the detainees for any signs of sickness. Ninety-four detainees began the strike on Monday.

According to European Court of Human Rights ruling, the two men from Bangladesh, Ilias Ilias and Ali Ahmed, were each given 10,000 euros, or $10,645, as well as costs because of their detention in a transit zone at Hungary’s border with Serbia, where both had applied for asylum.

Among other problems, the court found that the Hungarian authorities had failed to carry out an individual assessment of each applicant’s asylum case and had put them at risk of being sent back to Greece “to face inhuman and degrading reception conditions.”

The court also found that the 23 days the two men were held at the fenced transit zone “amounted to detention, meaning they had effectively been deprived of their liberty without any formal, reasoned decision and without appropriate judicial review.”

In 2015, Hungary built fences on its southern borders with Serbia and Croatia to stop migrants.