The Hungarian government war against civil society

Dear Colleagues,

We would like to inform you about the latest developments in Hungary - it is not yet covered in the international media well, but the Hungarian government started a very tough war against civil society a couple of months ago in Hungary. Of course against civil society that are considered to be not-pro-government by the government.
They are mainly human rights, anti-corruption, gender, LMBTQ, democracy developer NGOs. Now, the situation escalated that far that this Monday our (and another NGO's) office was raided by the police and they also took sensitive documents, laptops, our server, etc.
We are managing the EEA/Norway NGO Fund and we grant these very "dangerous" NGOs, the police wanted their data, as well.

Besides police investigations, the State Auditing/Controll Office announced that after checking on the Norway NGO Fund, they are going to continue their investigation with overviewing the Swiss NGO grants, as well (because we are managing both).

In these days the Austrian public TV visited these NGOs and on Monday the German public TV will make interviews with us. We definitely need to reach the EC, but until now we did not receive any positive response or support from their side. Therefore, we would like to ask you to share this information in your network and colleagues!

W can provide you more information on what the quite centralized Hungarian government is doing now against civil society using absolutely Putinist solutions in a EU member state.

A good summary of what happened: http://tasz.hu/en/node/4300.

ABC news, BBC and some channels covered the story, besides Spiegel, der Standard, the Economist, etc.:
http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/norway-denounces-hungarian-police-raids-ngos-25377965

http://www.hrw.org/news/2014/09/08/dispatches-hungary-s-police-raids-squeeze-civil-society

http://www.amnesty.eu/content/assets/Doc2014/eur270042014en.pdf

Thank you for your collaboration!

All the best,

DemNet staff