Hungary
Protests against Hungarian media law continuePosted Mar 23 2011
Thousands gathered in downtown Budapest to protest Hungary’s media law on Tuesday, March 15, 2011. The poster on the extreme left reads: “I could be Egyptian.” (AP Photo: Bela Szandelszky)
A week after the Hungarian parliament amended the country’s new media law in accordance with EU concerns, thousands took to the streets in Budapest to protest it.
On March 15, demonstrators gathered in the capital in what organizers called “Hungary's largest protest by civic groups since the 1989 start of the democratic process that ended the communist regime,” according to an AP report.
The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), an organization that monitors security and human rights in Europe, raised concerns about the law.
“The legislation can still be misused to curb alternative and differing voices in Hungary despite modifications adopted following a request from the European Commission,” Dunja Mijatović, the OSCE representative on Freedom of the Media said.
She added that the OSCE had sent a list of recommendations to the Hungarian government on Feb. 28, but they had not been used in the amendments.
At the rally, Adam Michnik, a prominent Polish journalist and editor-in-chief of Gazeta Wyborcza appreciated the government’s effort to change the law, but called on Prime Minister Viktor Orban to “respect media freedom,” The Economist reported.
On the same day, Orban delivered an address to mark Hungary’s national holiday commemorating its 1848 revolution against Austria.
“We did not tolerate being dictated to from Vienna in 1848 nor from Moscow in 1956 and 1990,” the AP quoted Orban as saying. “Now, we're not going to allow ourselves to be dictated to by anyone from Brussels or anywhere else.”