Navigating political versus partisan under a harmful regime

Dalma Dojcsák, Executive Director of the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union (HCLU), talks here about how authoritarianism is pushing our sector to redefine itself. In Hungary, right-wing poster child Viktor Orban has been dismantling human rights safeguards and harassing civil society organizations for the last 15 years. In that context, the HCLU has focused more on grassroots and practical action, showing people that human rights can be empowering and translate into tangible protection.

How does the question of whether human rights organizations should be more political, or engage more directly in political work, play out in Hungary?

As civil society organizations, we were pushed into being more political. When the first foreign agents law was introduced in Hungary in 2017, we were called mercenaries and foreign agents of foreign states, and so we had to become political. We had to protect ourselves and speak up and rebut the government‘s accusations.

The autocratic regime uses this narrative that politics and discussing politics is the exclusive right of elected officials. No one else who wants to take part is entitled to because the regime says they are paid by foreign entities to say certain things. And this is a tool to delegitimize movements and civil society organizations.

In this climate, it is essential for us to talk about what politics are, and what public discourse is. We often say that taking part in politics, being a politician, is not a privilege. Everyone is a politician in the end, because we all participate in the public discourse somehow. And that is our right and obligation as citizens.

In such a hostile environment, can human rights organizations be political without being partisan?

In Hungary, the government is anti-human rights and anti-democracy. It has dismantled the legal system and the institutions that serve to protect human rights through advocacy or litigation. And it has been basically impossible for us to do transparent policy work for more than a decade. We are not allowed in Parliament or in committee hearings anymore. We don’t have any access to the lawmaking process. This is a huge problem because we are losing all the skills and experience that the organization has built up since 1994.

This leads to very interesting questions: should we be working to change the government? Should we go door to door to urge people to vote for the political opposition? We define ourselves as nonpartisan and independent, so that doesn’t feel right. Also, to preserve our legal status as a public benefit association, we are required to remain nonpartisan.

But this is an ongoing discussion. Our internal policy is that we have to preserve our nonpartisan nature if we wish to be a watchdog under any upcoming government in Hungary. We offer our services and legal aid to politically active citizens and even parties. Our help and expertise are equally available to every political party, but for obvious reasons, the governing party will not come to us for help. Therefore, at the end of the day, we only aid opposition candidates and communities. We do this very transparently to preserve our independence.

Your organization has decentralized and engages with people by offering legal assistance and running a hotline, for example. Do you view that as political work?

Yes, we realize that changing the political reality in Hungary and going back to democracy depends on people. And human rights is a tool and the value that can mobilize people so they can stand up for their own rights, enforcing them either through the courts or in political situations, in talking to their representatives, in marching, in organizing… Even small actions, like workshops for just a few participants, are valuable steps toward change.

We’ve also been engaging more in existing coalitions and forging new ones. We work a lot with grassroots organizations made up of people directly affected by certain issues, so with green organizations that want to protect the environment in their town, or parents who advocate for the rights of their own children. Mothers, especially, are willing to do anything and everything to protect their children, and they are willing to do the political work.

Is there anything you have learned in recent years that could be of use to the broader human rights movement?

I think what we need to reclaim as a movement is that human rights are not a matter of left or right. Human rights are essential for everyone, because every person needs dignity, liberty, solidarity. That is what we communicate on the national level, and I think it would be useful to elevate this to the global discourse.

When women give birth in hospitals, no one cares if they are conservative or liberal; outdated hospital policies still violate their dignity, or endanger their lives. Protesters can protest for conservative and liberal ideas, but if they are beaten up by the police, the human rights violation is the same. And there are many examples like that.

So there’s a huge opportunity for us to talk about issues that are important for most people and to show them that, actually, human rights are important. And I think we can do this without sacrificing issues that are important for the left, like trans issues. But we have to find a language that is unifying and doesn’t allow the far-right to polarize us as they do now.

Download the complete series of interviews of Hard Conversations for the Future of Human Rights.