Joint position paper put forward by NGOs on the Hungarian Media Law and its Application

The government has submitted an amendment proposal that would exclude protests from the most important, symbolic public squares of Budapest during national holidays. Furthermore, it would empower local governments to remove further areas a no-protest zone.

Now that the election date has been set, we will start to feel the menacing deficiencies of the new election procedures. HCLU has started its election monitoring work, during which it is going to document if and how these procedures, which are going to be applied for the first time in 2014, harm our constitutional rights. In the coming months we are going to examine if the data, which draws an objective picture of the different election phases, supports our suspicion that the new regulations violate participation rights in practice.