Campfire-Festival 2019

Imagine you helped a refugee to find their way to the asylum office, and you ended up in jail as a result? Imagine you lost the right to live in the place of your residence, and being found guilty of a criminal offence as a result?

This is Hungary in 2019.
Hungary is an EU member state and receives significant foreign direct investment from German companies.
In 2018, Hungarian Parliament passed a constitutional amendment banning homelessness. Homeless people can be taken into custody if they ignore police requests to leave their space and they face accelerated trials and prison sentences. The police can confiscate or destroy a homeless person’s belongings at any time, including personal effects. The homeless person can be required to pay for expenses generated by such actions.
Academic freedom is also under threat: in 2018, the Hungarian government forced the Central European University out of the country and banned Gender Studies. In June 2019, the government decided to take over the assets of the research institutes of the Hungarian Academy of Science.
Open Society Foundations closed its international office in Budapest and moved to Berlin in August 2018, leaving what it called "an increasingly repressive political and legal environment" in Hungary. OSF departed Budapest after the government announced restrictions on non-profit organizations under a law dubbed the "Stop Soros" bill. “The government of Hungary has denigrated and misrepresented our work and repressed civil society for the sake of political gain, using tactics unprecedented in the history of the European Union,” OSF president Patrick Gaspard said in a statement at the time.

In this session, staff members that worked for Open Society Foundations in Budapest will relate their experiences of being forced out of Hungary and of their transition to Berlin, discussing the political evolution of a progressive transition into ‘illiberal democracy’ and authoritarian state.