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SZÁZADVÉG: HUNGARIAN HELSINKI COMMITTEE CAUSE FOR CONCERN

 

The Századvég Foundation says the Hungarian Helsinki Committee and other foreign-funded NGOs present a danger to Hungary’s legal certainty and national sovereignty. In a statement, the think-tank said it has been regularly analysing the operation of such NGOs in Hungary. It noted that an earlier analysis in 2018 already showed that various foreign organisations had pumped around 500,000,000 forints into the Helsinki Committee. It is not only funded by Open Society Foundations affiliated with US financier George Soros, but its clients include the European Commission, which has supported programmes that “strengthen the rights of suspects” and “provide legal assistance to asylum seekers,” to the tune of tens of millions of forints. Századvég said the Netherlands embassy in Budapest had commissioned the NGO to study the independence of Hungary’s courts, and the UN commissioned it to investigate whether asylum seekers had proper access to justice. “Given the complex financing background of the Hungarian Helsinki Committee and its shallow social embeddedness – and the fact that the NGOs are largely accountable to their foreign financiers – their activities can be seen as a cause for concern”.