‘They Want Scapegoats’:Hungary Cracks Down on Homelessness

By Keno Verseck

AFP

The conservative Hungarian government has repeatedly targeted the homeless with its recent policies. Now a new ban on sleeping outdoors is drawing outrage and accusations of scapegoating.

A large source of their income used to come from collecting discarded household items, which they would clean, repair and resell at markets. But now they’ve become more cautious, thanks to the trash law that has been in place since January in Hungary.

According to the regulations, large discarded items in public places are the property of those officially in charge of their removal. Those who are unauthorized to do so face fines and jail time — a rule that targets the many homeless trash collectors in the country.

But now things have gotten even worse for Hungary’s homeless. On Monday evening, the parliament in Budapest passed a law banning the homeless from sleeping outdoors around certain public places, though the law’s criteria remains vague. The law applies to all of Hungary’s World Heritage Sites, as well as any other homeless-free zones designated by local city authorities. Those who violate the ban face fines, community service and even jail time for repeat offenses.




Not Enough Shelters

The new law is actually an amendment to one passed last year that was subsequently struck down by the Constitutional Court. To avoid another rejection by the court, the national conservative government under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán passed an amendment to the Hungarian constitution earlier this year that makes it difficult to declare the law unconstitutional again.

A number of Hungarian human rights organizations are now protesting the new law, calling on the country’s president, János Áder, not to sign it. “The criminalization of the homeless violates basic rights and is unacceptable,” declared a joint statement by the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union (HCLU), the Hungarian Helsinki Committee and seven other civil groups.

“The new law basically makes homelessness a punishable offense,” says Tessza Udvarhelyi ofThe City Is for All, an initiative that champions the rights of the homeless. “Many don’t know what to do now. The government has promised that all homeless people will be accommodated in shelters, but there are no spaces available in the shelters.”

According to estimates by aid organizations, between 10,000 and 15,000 homeless people live in the capital of Budapest, a city of some 2 million. But there is lodging in shelters for only about 6,000.

Gábor Iványi, a prominent Methodist pastor who has been ministering to the homeless for some two decades, says his soup kitchen and homeless shelter at a church in Budapest’s 8th district are frequently overflowing. “The new law against the homeless is deeply un-Christian, as is the approach by officials,” he says. “They are constantly sending patrols to the shelter and harassing people, even when they are simply waiting for food.”
Government representatives reject such criticism. “It is sheer nonsense to call it the criminalization of the homeless,” says Gergely Pröhle, a senior Foreign Ministry official. “We just don’t want the homeless to live in certain public places that are heavily visited by tourists, and that is totally legitimate.”




Distracting from Other Issues

Tessza Udvarhelyi disagrees. She says that the policies are part of a wider hostility toward the poor by Orbán’s government. “They need scapegoats to distract from the poor social situation in the country, and therefore use the poorest of the poor, the homeless, Roma and refugees,” she says. While past governments have also taken aim at the homeless, their approach was not as systematic, she adds.

“Before the Constitutional Court ruled last year that the law against homelessness was unconstitutional, it was valid for eight months,” says Udvarhelyi, “and in these eight months the equivalent of €130,000 in fines were imposed against 2,000 homeless people in Budapest. With this, policy on homelessness took on quite a new quality.”

The Lakatos moved from eastern Hungary to Budapest in 1992. Zsuzsanna Lakatos had worked as a bookkeeper at a steel combine in the city of Miskolc. Her husband had been a day laborer on a farm. In 1991 they both found themselves unemployed and then homeless. They now live on a private estate on the southwestern outskirts of Budapest. The owner of the land has allowed them to repair the ruins of an old building and live in it. This way they are not as vulnerable to the police, who have long been clearing the homeless out of huts and camps in many public wastelands, even on the outskirts of the Hungarian capital.

But despite the relative privilege of their living situation compared to other homeless people, the Lakatos are afraid. In recent years they’ve been increasingly subjected to police checks. Sometimes Bertalan, who is Roma, is insulted as a “dirty gypsy.”

“I hope we don’t face any fines or prison sentences,” says Zsuzsanna. “When the new law comes into force, we will do our best to go underground.” Isn’t that exactly what the government wants? “Yes,” she answers.

To make or read comments and to see more photos, go to http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/new-hungarian-law-discriminates-against-homeless-a-925822.html .

By PABLO GORONDI January 17, 2013 6:33 AM

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BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) — Homeless men and women huddle on street corners amid Budapest’s majestic domed palaces, shivering under old blankets and cardboard boxes in frigid winter weather.

It’s an image that critics say Prime Minister Viktor Orban doesn’t want the world to see. And if he has his way, the homeless could be fined and even jailed for sleeping outside — even though some of the country’s homeless shelters are already overflowing and short of beds.

Orban’s punitive ideas for the homeless have set him up for his latest clash with the constitutional court and civil rights groups as he tries to reshape the country in a conservative image by centralizing power. Since winning power in 2010, Orban and his party have undermined independent institutions and democratic standards in a nation that was once an icon of democratic struggle for throwing off communism in 1989.

Now Orban is carrying out an informal referendum at town hall meetings around the country to gauge support for a constitutional amendment that would enshrine punishments for the homeless in the charter itself.
Hungary’s homeless policy has revived accusations by human rights groups that Orban’s ruling Fidesz party cares little about the country’s disadvantaged. In just one recent controversy, one of the party’s founding members, journalist Zsolt Bayer wrote in a newspaper column that many of the country’s Gypsies, or Roma — an impoverished minority that faces entrenched discrimination — “are animals” and “unfit for coexistence.”
Fidesz refused to distance itself from the column, saying it understood citizens’ anger about crimes committed by Roma and called on those demanding Bayer’s expulsion from the party “to refrain from standing on the side of the criminals.”

The homeless issue has been brewing for several years. At the end of 2011, Orban’s ruling right-wing Fidesz party used its overwhelming parliamentary majority to make the punitive regulations first introduced earlier that year by the Fidesz-backed mayor of Budapest — including fines of up to $650 for repeat offenders and the threat of up to 60 days in jail — applicable nationwide.
“This is a method to demoralize or intimidate us,” said Gyula Balog, 53, who has been homeless for nearly 20 years. “No one was jailed but quite a few had to pay fines. It’s frivolous to fine those who have nothing.”

At the time, even the United Nations expressed concerns, saying the obligation to provide shelter “cannot serve as an excuse for the criminalization or forced detention of homeless persons.”
“By a wave of the legislative pen, the Hungarian Parliament has labeled tens of thousands of homeless people in Hungary as potential criminals,” said a statement from two U.N. human rights experts. “Moreover, the law has a discriminatory impact on those living in poverty.”
At least 1,500 homeless are believed to be currently living rough in Budapest, even as temperatures are expected to remain below freezing in coming days and dozens of homeless are found frozen to death each year on the streets.

In the winter, many head to the warmest spots they can find, usually the entrance halls of subway stations, sometimes quietly holding out a paper cup for money from passersby or by selling street newspapers.
Authorities recently inaugurated two more shelters in the capital and the government spent 8.5 billion forints ($38.4 million, €28.9 billion) on the homeless in 2012, with a similar figure planned this year. But some of the most popular refuges, like the “Heated Street” run by the Hungarian Evangelical Brotherhood, are full far beyond capacity, with many people sleeping on mats on the floor.
The issue of the fines re-emerged in November when the constitutional court struck down the punishments, saying homelessness was a social issue that should not be handled as a criminal matter.
There are no exact figures on the number of homeless in Hungary, but the U.N. last year put the figure at between 30,000 and 35,000. A survey carried out each year on Feb. 3 in Budapest and the larger Hungarian cities by NGOs, counted 8,641 in 2012, up from 7,199 in 2011.

Many cities across the United States also ban activities such as “urban camping,” panhandling, “lodging” outdoors and similar actions, often resulting in fines or jail time for offenders.
The Hungarian government argues that it is simply acting out of concern for the dozens of homeless people who freeze to death every year, implying that fines are meant to push the displaced to seek refuge in warm shelters.
“There are more places in heated shelters than there are homeless living in Hungary,” Orban said last month in Parliament. “So no one … is forced to survive winter under the open sky.”
But social workers and the homeless themselves accuse the government of caring only about the country’s image.
“They simply want to clean up the areas frequented by tourists,” said Balog, speaking outside the department store where he sold Commodore 64 computers during communism, before losing his job and family because of his alcoholism.