The case“Hungary vs. Everyone Else” on free speech and media freedom limitations has been escalating for quite some time now. However,and ironically enough, bounds on hate speech regulation remain loose –and this is based on one’s right to express her uncensored opinion. Let us, therefore, observe questions of free speech from the other side.
On October 4, three Hungarian NGOs have published their correspondence with the Interior Ministry on the controversy concerning a right-wing extremist march in a town with a considerable Roma population. TheDevecser demonstration involved offensive utterances and violent acts as well: demonstrators have left the official spot of concourse, went to the areas where Roma residents live and started throwing stones over them. The Hungarian Helsinki Committee, the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union and the Eötvös Károly Institute criticized the lack of appropriate police conduct and the fact that no one was arrested.
The Ministry’s response is shocking on more levels. The demonstration itself is still qualified as peaceful its aim being not to encourage participants to commit violent acts; and some of the participants throwing stones is, let’s say,within the margins of error. The other notable issue is that they refused to qualify these offensive public expressions as instances of hate speech, which is a type of criminal offense defined in the Hungarian Criminal Code.
Anyone, who publicly incites to hatred (and especially in the presence of the ones incited against), is guilty of a felony. Now, the emphasis here is on inciting in the sense that it has to be suitable for inciting others to act. In this sense a judge has to jump into the role of a linguist, analyze the context and determine what speakers wanted to do with words. In practice, it seems that it has always been somewhat difficult for Hungarian judges to recognize the bearings of such cases: a past Helsinki Committee report points out that recorded criminal offenses related to hate speech amount to an average of 5, annually. This picture suggests that Hungary is a peaceful country without hatred on the public level. This, however, is not very likely to be the case given that hate speech against Hungarian Roma people is increasingly common even on the highest levels of political discourse. Apart from the extreme right party in the National Assembly, European Roma Rights Centre reports remind us on cases when the (incumbent) Parliamentary Commissioner of Civil Right, the Prime Minister or the head of the Miskolc Police Headquarters talks about “gipsy criminality”, that is, a type of crime categorized on ethnic basis (there is, of course, no statistics on the ethnic affiliations of crime perpetrators in general; the only sort of evidence in hand is that Roma people are overrepresented in prisons. But let us not talk about the question of ethnic profiling at this point).The very much distorted Hungarian perception of hate speech is also illustrated by the fact that international critique on the Hungarian government is automatically categorized (by the government) as incitement against the Hungarian nation itself.
The philosophy of this very article’s author is that hate speech is not to be limited to the possibilities of mobilizing, but rather should be understood as offense that can very well result in hindering citizens in being treated with equal respect. However, understanding that radical legal measures are only applicable on actual harms on people, there does not seem to be any serious problem with the Hungarian law in question. The Constitutional Courts corresponding opinions (95/2008, 12/1999, 30/1992) all seek to establish an objective account on hate speech issues. The problem, as above mentioned, that actual sentences fail to recognize what is suitable for inciting others to act. The time gap as a disturbing factor is not explanatory in a lot of cases. For this demonstration,this gap took about 10 minutes.
Laszlo Horvath
Political Science
Hungary
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