Authors

Discussion

This paper chronicles the evolution of Hungary’s clandestine and diverse human rights scene in the 1980s, which culminated in the foundation of the Hungarian Helsinki Committee (HHC). It recounts how dissidents reported individual grievances and abuses by the communist regime, translating them into the language of human rights, targeting domestic and foreign audiences. Despite Hungarian dissidents’ embeddedness in the international human rights network and the wide circulation of samizdat newspapers systematically covering human rights violations, the HHC was only established in 1989, when democratic transition was already in full swing. Its relatively late foundation can be explained by the weakness of the Hungarian dissident movement especially compared to Poland’s Solidarity. This was a result of the “Kádárist consensus” (Mink 2005) between the communist soft dictatorship and society. This rested on the regime providing a higher level of personal welfare and human freedoms than in other communist countries; in exchange citizens tolerated the system without radical forms of contestation. Nonetheless, a nascent human rights movement emerged from the late 1970s through various samizdat publications, the creation of SZETA in 1979 (Szegényeket Támogató Alap, Foundation for the Support of the Poor, a social rights-oriented group with a thematic focus on poverty and the Roma), and the creation of the Independent Legal Protection Agency (ILPA), the direct precursor of HHC, in 1988. ILPA’s legal philosophy reflected a direct critique of the system by providing support to victims of police harassment, whose rights were often violated by existing laws. ILPA was thus moving away from the legal and moral basis of lawfulness, while making references to international human rights conventions signed by Hungary. ILPA was transformed into the HHC under the International Helsinki Alliance’s tutelage. They took a cross-party approach, incorporating representatives of every party from the democratic opposition, including the political right, the latter as the winner of the first democratic elections. This politically diverse membership created much tension within the HHC, and in the first years of its existence it was virtually paralyzed by political infighting. It was only rejuvenated in 1994. The HHC’s agenda in the early 1990s was dominated by the topic of refugees and problems of the Hungarian minorities, especially in Romania. The paper provides a systematic textual analysis of documents reporting human rights violations from the Open Society Archives covering the 1980s and early 1990s, including samizdat newspapers such as Beszélő, Demokrata, Hírmondó, reports of ILPA, Radio Free Europe and the International Helsinki Federation files.