The Debrecen Chief Prosecutor’s Office has requested the upholding of the verdict against a Singaporean and two Hungarian citizens who trafficked migrants to France in the summer of 2020.
According to the verdict, the Singaporean citizen, who played a leading role in the crime, came into contact with a criminal organization directed from Paris. The organization’s goal was to arrange and facilitate the travel of Sri Lankan citizens—who legally entered Romania and took up work there but did not have Schengen visas—to Paris, in exchange for financial compensation.
The Singaporean citizen became the organizer of the operation in Hungary. His task was to safely transport migrants who had entered Hungary illegally to rest stops, to Hungarian transporters, or directly to the French human traffickers awaiting them. He was assisted in this by his Hungarian accomplices. The migrants traveled from Romania to Hungary across the green border, guided by routes and coordinates sent to them by the French members of the organization. The migrants then sent messages indicating their exact location, enabling the Hungarian perpetrators to locate them, hide them in their homes, or transport them further before handing them over to the waiting transporters. From February 2020 until their arrest in July 2020, the perpetrators smuggled people into the European Union.
The Nyíregyháza Court found the defendants guilty of human trafficking as co-perpetrators. The Singaporean citizen was sentenced to 11 years in prison and permanently expelled from Hungary. Due to the organized nature of the crime, he was also denied eligibility for parole. One Hungarian citizen received a prison sentence of 5 years and 6 months, while the other was sentenced to 2 years, suspended for 4 years probation.
The defendants and their lawyers appealed the verdict, seeking acquittal, a different classification of the crime, or reduced sentences.
The Debrecen Chief Prosecutor’s Office holds that the court’s decision is lawful and well-founded. The court correctly considered the circumstances of guilt and evaluated them according to their severity for all three defendants; therefore, appeals seeking mitigation are unlikely to succeed.
The Debrecen Court of Appeal will decide the case in the second instance.
(ugyeszseg.hu)
