Acceptance speech of the Calouste Gulbenkian 2017 Prize – Márta Pardavi

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Your Excellency the President of Portugal,

Your Excellency Madame President of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation,

Distinguished members of the Jury,

Excellencies,

Ladies and Gentlemen,

On behalf of the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, I want to thank you profoundly for awarding us the Gulbenkian Prize in human rights this year. We are honoured, we are very proud and we are very much enthused by your support.

The Hungarian Helsinki Committee was founded in 1989, almost thirty years ago, in what was a positive and hopeful period for human rights protection in Europe, and certainly in Central Europe. One can say that a lot has changed since then. Human rights defenders are detained and arrested for their important work in Russia, in Turkey and beyond. Globally, human rights are at risk. In Hungary, we, as a human rights organisation, we also experience immense political pressure on our work and propaganda and laws that aim to curb and intimidate a free civil society.

In fact, this very prize that we so proudly receive today is going to be considered as suspicious foreign funding under a new law that has just been adopted in Hungary in June. This law requires non-governmental organisations that receive foreign funding over the amount of about 23 000 Euros to register at court, on a separate special list of foreign-funded NGOs. The law requires that this label is displayed on all our public materials. We have decided, with the Hungarian Helsinki Committee and many other human rights NGOs in Hungary, to protest against this stigma, to preserve and protect a free civil society. The Hungarian Helsinki Committee has decided to resist this stigmatising law and not be intimidated, and we will use all legal avenues to fight this law.

This is something that we have always done, it is very consistent with what we do. For over 25 years, we have been using the law to protect human rights and this is something that every human rights lawyer and human rights defender does.

We have always done this, our core purpose has not changed. We seek to protect the rule of law, the right to asylum, the right to be free from torture and ill-treatment, the right to personal liberty, and we also try to ensure that people have access to justice so that they can enforce these rights.

The recognition we receive today is foremost the result of the work of our team which just consists of about 35 individuals. We are not a large NGO by global standards, in a small country like Hungary, we are a large human rights NGO. But we still are only 35, highly committed, highly dedicated and highly professional colleagues. I am proud and very grateful for being able to be a member of such a wonderful team.

I would also like to thank our clients, refugees and Hungarian citizens alike, who place their trust in a human rights organisation such as the Hungarian Helsinki Committee. In many cases, they have been turned away and turned down so many times, and still, they persevere with dignity to seek justice.

For example, we have clients, asylum-seeker clients, coming from Afghanistan or Iraq, who are held in what is called a transit zone at the Hungarian-Serbian border. They can be families with small children, with babies, pregnant mothers, and they are locked up, detained in a container camp that is encircled by barbed wire and which is guarded all the time by police and security guards. They have gone through so much in the hope of reaching safety and a peaceful future for themselves and their children. They don’t know what is going to happen to them, they don’t know how long they will be detained.  When we hear them asking for legal advice and legal assistance, we at the Hungarian Helsinki Committee find it our duty to do our best and to honour our responsibilities as fellow human beings and as human rights lawyers. With a growing number of people having to flee their homes around the world, we try to assist those who are beyond Hungary. With our limited means, we have created the Refugee Law Reader, an online library, where people who teach and would like to learn about refugee law can find a lot of information that they otherwise would not have access to.

Finally, I would like to express our appreciation for the cooperation and support of our donors and partners, such as UNHCR and many private foundations and civil society organisations, volunteers and individuals in Hungary, in Europe and beyond, who help us in our daily work.

With your solidarity, your support and actions, we can uphold human rights and ensure that they remain a ray of shining light even in times of darkness.