Hungary’s Helsinki Committee abandons own founding principles

Lost credibility

The Helsinki Committee of Hungary no longer believes in equality before the law. It no longer ascribes to the tenets of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In short the Helsinki Committee believes that only those who share their own politics deserve protection from arbitrary arrest and summary judicial punishment.

A staggering declaration issued by the Committee on the suspiciously well-timed Wednesday of this week, was made despite the self-evident fact that its content flew totally in the face of both the letter and spirit of the Committee’s founding document.

Helsinki Committees date from the pre-1989 Communist era when they were established in a variety of Central and Eastern European countries to monitor human rights under those oppressive regimes. Founded according to the Articles of the Helsinki Accord, they naturally took as their central axiom the same one of all human rights bodies, namely, that it is the citizen that requires protection from the state, because the state is infinitely more powerful than the individual.

Yet despite this apparently fundamental principle, the Helsinki Committee chose this week to declare that it approved of the court decision earlier this year which demanded the legal dissolution of the Hungarian Guard. What relevance such an assertion had, given that the old Hungarian Guard was indeed broken up, and that free citizens had then formed a new legal entity, as is their right; the Committee did not say.

However, the language in which the Committee chose to continue made its statements deserving of more than astonishment, but actually worthy of outrage. It stated that Guard members, by virtue of being Guard members, could be declared to be engaged in illegal activity despite the fact that they weren’t in fact committing any actually illegal acts.

To clarify, the Committee feels itself justified in approving the criminalization of free citizens not for any action, but in effect for existing: an authoritarian’s dream.

Therefore, it also seeks to abolish the fundamental principle of equal treatment before the law: the crucial differentiating feature between free democracies and tyrannies.

All citizens, we may presume, are to be granted the political right to free assembly, if and only if, such an assembly meets with the Helsinki Committee of Hungary’s approval. Breathtaking. With friends like these it is to be wondered that the Hungarian people ever managed to break free of Communism at all.

This extraordinary behaviour has not been an isolated incident this week. As an unseemly scramble took place within liberal organizations desperate to give Draskovics’ masked thugs a casus belli to repress demonstrators at Friday’s commemorative events.

One such disappointing example being a thinly veiled Jobbik attack piece in Transitions Online. Entitled “Hungary: Where Did We Go Wrong?” what did it consider to be the abiding problem of twenty years of modern Hungarian democracy? Rampant corruption, a destroyed education system, chronic deception in public life, wildfire unemployment, a bankrupt economy, police brutality, a rural crime epidemic, or the slow deliberate erosion of Hungarian culture? No. In its wisdom it considered the Hungarian Guard most worthy of condemnation; all the more astonishing given that the new Hungarian Guard, like its predecessor, had been brought into existence by a people so desperate at governmental incompetence and inaction at the last three problems previously listed.

In a move entirely unworthy of an organisation usually one of the few sources of measured investigative journalism about Hungary, it then went on to deliberately blacken the name of Krisztina Morvai MEP. By the misleading use of the phrase “our kind” of people that she has used on several occasions, and which she also incorporated in her speech to those amassed in Deák Square this Friday. Intentionally implying that it had a racist meaning.

Surely, as an online journal, it might have occurred to Transitions Online that the nonsense they were peddling could easily be verified as such by anybody possessing an internet connection with the whit to access YouTube? Upon which one may find Dr Morvai using this phrase, in English also, to mean as it does the honest, hard-working, law-abiding majority who are faced with a global capitalism that does not care for their fate and an authoritarian government that cares even less.

Dr Morvai, who after such a short time as an MEP is already acquiring a reputation as “Hungary’s voice in Europe,” and is considered even by her enemies to be the country’s foremost human rights advocate is entirely unworthy of such libel-by-inference. Indeed she deserves nothing less than the country’s gratitude for her prescient interventions in Europe last week, which ensured sufficient international observance of events this Friday as to make the regime think twice over its plans.

We suggest that Transitions Online return to its investigative traditions, if so they might also have noticed recent events in Debrecen in which the Police attempted to harass a group of new Hungarian Guardsmen and women, only to have the city’s population deliberately surround the volunteers in order to prevent their intimidation by authorities; and perhaps they should ask themselves why such occurrences are becoming increasingly frequent.

As for the Helsinki Committee of Hungary? Jobbik requests that they consult Article VII of the Helsinki Accord which led to their foundation, asserting as it does, “respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief;” and then ask themselves how they square such statements with their new found love of authoritarianism.