OSF Turns to Strasbourg Court to Get Hungary's NGO Law Repealed
U.S. billionaire George Soros’s Open Society Foundations (OSF) said on Monday it would challenge at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg Hungarian laws that make it a crime to help asylum-seekers.
But Budapest, which accuses Soros and the liberal groups and causes he backs of trying to destroy Europe’s Christian culture by promoting mass migration, said it would not repeal the laws, whatever the outcome of the court appeal.
Under legislation named “Stop Soros”, anybody who helps migrants not entitled to protection to apply for asylum, or helps illegal migrants gain status to stay in Hungary, can be jailed. Orban has also introduced a 25 percent special tax on aid groups it says support migration.
OSF said the “Stop Soros” legislation, approved by the Hungarian parliament in June, “breaches the guarantees of freedom of expression and association enshrined in the European Convention of Human Rights and must be repealed”.
“The Hungarian government has fabricated a narrative of lies to blind people to the truth: that these laws were designed to intimidate independent civil society groups, in another step toward silencing all dissent,” OSF president Patrick Gaspard said in a statement.