The Ombudsman turns to the Curia in connection with the Budapest City Hall's decree on homeless free zones

According to the Commissioner for Fundamental Rights, in its decree adopted last December upon the initiative of the districts, the General Assembly of the Capital specified an excessively wide range of public areas where residential habitation (occupying public places for living purposes) by the homeless would be illegal. Therefore, Ombudsman László Székely petitioned the Curia requesting the review of the annex of the "zone decree", drafted without due regards to the provisions of the misdemeanour act concerning authorization.

In their petition submitted to the Commissioner, some representatives of the capital city's General Assembly challenged the "zone decree" adopted in December 2013 under the authorization of the misdemeanour act. In their view, the City Hall's decree, based on the proposal of district self‑governments, listing a significant part of Budapest as a homeless‑free zone where residential habitation was prohibited, had created a situation conducive to the infringement of fundamental rights. As the Ombudsman found their petition duly substantiated, he turned to the Curia requesting the review and the annulment of some of the provisions of the decree.

In his reasoning to his petition the Ombudsman pointed out that, by virtue of the misdemeanour act, local governments are authorized to specify public places where residential habitation is illegal only in the context of constitutional values and purposes, i.e., in the interests of the protection of public order, public security, public health and cultural assets. In accordance with the decree in question, the homeless-free zones of the capital shall include all stops and stations of municipal public transportation, rail stations, playgrounds, cemeteries, institutions of child welfare, child protection, public and higher education, bridges, overdrives and altogether 34 underground passages and their immediate vicinities. Fourteen of the twenty three districts of the capital passed resolutions on designating homeless-free zones of various sizes. Some of the districts even specified land registry numbers, other simply listed all public places of the above designations and their vicinities.

According to the Commissioner for Fundamental Rights, those provisions raise the most serious concerns which, directly or indirectly, prohibit residential habitation in large, contiguous public areas irrespective of their designations and functions. The Commissioner emphasized that such provisions turned the logic of authorization upside down since they either treated prohibition as a main rule instead of an exception or, as in the case of some districts, e.g., Angyalföld and Zugló, made it exclusive. His petition also highlighted the problem of the so‑called "buffer zones", areas surrounding the homeless‑free zones, also under prohibition, since their ranges (50, 10 or even 200 metres) were specified in the decree randomly, with no explanation whatsoever. In the Ombudsman's view, designating entire districts or parts of districts as prohibited for no objective reason is not going to solve the associated problems, only transfers them to those districts that have no such restrictions, which may lead to a "vicious circle" raising fundamental rights concerns".

László Székely stressed that his legal objections were based on fundamental rights concerns: designating prohibited areas basically affects the rights of the already vulnerable homeless. He pointed out that although the local government's decree does not sanction directly homelessness, living in the streets, the unreasonable extension of prohibited zones may lead to the ousting and the criminalization of the homeless.