R.R. and Others v. Hungary, ECtHR, Application no. 36037/17, Judgment of 2 March 2021

Keeping asylum-seeking family in the transit zone amounts to detention in breach of Articles 5(1) and 5(4). Significant case, as the Court finally joined the broad consensus regarding the nature of placement in the Hungarian transit zones, contrary to the findings in Ilias and Ahmed ECtHR GC judgement, where it concluded that transit zones are not detention. The Court also found that the conditions in the transit zone amounted to a violation of Article 3. It found that given the physical conditions of the containers in which the applicants were accommodated, the unsuitability of the facilities for children, the lack of professional psychological assistance and the duration of the stay in the transit zone, the threshold of severity required to engage Article 3 had been reached.

http://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng?i=001-208406