The police failed to consider that the assault on the chairmen of the Raoul Wallenberg Association bears an anti-semitic bias and failed to investigate the incident as hate crime despite the fact that the law provides greater protection for the victims of hate crime. Apparently, the judicial practice presents deficiencies in this area.

The government has already waged a full scale attack on fundamental rights and democratic institutions with the Fourth Amendment to the Fundamental Law, Hungary’s new constitution. Now an amendment to the law on equal opportunity will open the door for segregation in schools under the paper-thin veneer of positive discrimination. The HCLU opposes both the constitutional provision which allows discrimination and the amendment to the equal opportunity law based on the former.

The aim of the Prize is to acknowledge television and online video works aimed at highlighting the problems of marginalised groups, and raising public and media awareness. It is a big honour for us to be awarded this prize in 2013.

How might the authorities use and abuse the law to harass somebody? Imposing fines for minor offences is an easy way. Especially, if the person involved is underprivileged, therefore has little capability to enforce his rights.

Under the guise of observations "in service of the residents”, uniformed men terrorize children and harass adults based on their ethnicity or national status in Magyarbánhegyes. According to this, it seems as if police did not defend locals against persecution. (The Civil Guard Association for a Better Future with other extremist anti-Roma groups – pretending to be militiamen and vindicating the right to maintain public order – have started a systematic campaign of intimidation against the Roma for weeks in Gyöngyöspata, Hungary in April 2011. They illegally patrolled the village and provoked the Roma adults and children.The HCLU published its Shadow Report and a documentary video about the events. The summary of the Shadow Report can be found here.

Roma travelling by bicycle in Kesznyéten are systematically fined for trivialities and receive disproportionate fines for minor offences. When our film crew visited Kesznyéten, they interviewed non-Roma cyclists as well. Out of these randomly chosen 10 individuals there was only one person who had received a fine for a cycling offence. Even though on average (as seen in the accompanying video), their bicycles were not in better condition or better equipped. Still, the Non-Roma travelling by bicycle are not even stopped by the police.

The police once again fails to properly classify cases, and instead of investigating the racial motivation and consider the recent incidents in Cegled violence against a member of a community, focuses on simple rowdyism – as it was made evident from the statement by the National Police.

It is not nice to pick endangered flowers, to litter in public spaces, to park in tow-away-zones, to fish without a license or to collect firewood from the forest. The introduction of handcuffs, body search and service dogs is nonetheless an overreaction on behalf of the government. The number of abuses of power may increase due to the recent changes initiated by government and accepted by the Parliament.

Open letter to Zoltán Kovács, State Secretary of Communications, who in New York, in response to the American Foreign Ministry’s Country Report said ’In our minds, there is no disrimination against the Roma in Hungary.’

The 2012 budget for the public works program is 140-150 billion forints. Earlier we spoke with Vera Messing, researcher for both the Hungarian Academy of Sciences Institute for Sociology and Central European University, regarding the specifics and effects of the public works program.

The opportunity for the government to make good on the mishandling of events and its series of mistakes in Gyöngyöspata has come and gone. It failed to condemn politicizing and operations based on the theory of collective criminality and it also failed to lay blame on the right-wing political party Jobbik for inciting hatred against the Roma minority.

Instead, the government made the reasoning of Jobbik its own and it is more worried about its international reputation, while clearly, any government is judged upon its own actions and failures.

You can read the new illustrated project desription of the HCLU Roma Program here!