The Hungarian Civil Liberties Union is a human rights NGO. Since our foundation in 1994, we have been working for everybody being informed about their fundamental human rights and empowered to enforce it against the undue interference by those in position of public power.
The Drugreporter was the official filmmaker of the International Drug Policy Reform Conference 2013 in Denver, Colorado. Watch our movies produced at this great event! First part with videos from the opening and closing sessions.
In response to increasing restrictions on personal freedoms and civil protest, independent national human rights organisations from ten countries today launched the International Network of Civil Liberties Organisations (INCLO). They also released “Take Back the Streets: Repression and Criminalisation of Protest Around the World,” a collection of nine case studies showing patterns of police crackdown and abuse against peaceful assembly, accompanied by concrete recommendations to expand free speech.
Local governments of Bélapátfalva and Szilvásvárad, two small settlements in Hungary, protested against disabled people who were going to move into their community. The rejected are the former residents of the social care home in Bélapátfalva, an institution that housed more than 300 disabled and elderly people who lived in exclusion.
Hungarian and international NGOs have responded to police statements about a possible racist attack in front of a primary school in Konyár. The Hungarian Police force has stated that there were no human rights violations on 5 September when a busload of football fans stopped in front of the school. The police based their conclusion on an unclear, mute recording, which they recently released. However, according to human rights organisations, the legality of the police reaction is disputable, and the recording is not sufficient to explain what happened in Konyár.
The HCLU is one of the six human rights NGOs calling on Hungarian authorities to fully investigate an incident at a school in Konyár on 5 September, and the police response. A busload of football fans stopped outside the school, which has a large majority of Roma pupils, and which had to dismiss a teacher for racist comments earlier this year. What happened next is unclear, as police reports differ greatly from eyewitness reports.
Amnesty International, the European Roma Rights Centre, the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, the Legal Defence Bureau for National and Ethnic Minorities, and the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union welcomed the Budapest District Court decision according to which the series of attacks against Hungarian Roma in 2008-2009 were racially motivated.