Social awareness campaigns
In the last two years I have coordinated several campaigns with Lajos Balogh, campaigner and Márió Kiss, community organiser and activist.
Following an outrageously discriminatory case against Roma conference guests – they were denied entry to a courtyard in the city centre of Budapest – Márió Kiss started the first campaign at the aHang platform in October 2018 and submitted an appeal to the Equal Treatment Authority (ETA). In September 2019, the ETA ruled in favour of the complainant at the second appeal level and imposed fine on the courtyard. This case is a precedent for a public club found guilty in discriminatory act against Roma people.
The breakthrough came in 2019: we successfully mobilised citizens, and Balogh achieved that the National Roma Self-Government reinstalled the memorial plaque commemorating the victims of a series of homicides against the Roma.
Using the campaign platform, we grasped this opportunity to direct more attention to discrimination, segregation, and hate speech in Hungary. In May 2019, almost 7000 citizens and 40 organisations joined an open letter asking the government to stop the far-right party Mi Hazánk (Our Homeland) from forming a paramilitary group. Nationalist and extremist groups protested in a small town (Törökszentmiklós) against “Roma crime”. Weeks later, the platform mobilised protesters to Szeged, where the paramilitary group was about to be established officially. The activists and citizens’ demonstration largely outnumbered the attendance of the far-right ceremony. With this solidarity action that day, more than 10 cities said no to hatred and to the intimidation of the Roma community – and the far-right group has not announced the official formation of the paramilitary group yet.
Read more about the campaigns in Hungarian:
https://ahang.hu/en/campaigns/whats-going-on-here/2018/11/16/
The City Is for All group aimed for a law amendment to protect families with children from evictions. The campaign focuses on housing poverty in Hungary with the reinterpretation of the official ‘Year of the Families’ poster from 2019.
