Helsinki File: Detainee's contact with the outside world

In March 2025, the Council of Europe’s Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT) conducted an ad hoc visit to Hungary. To highlight pressing issues regarding conditions in Hungarian prisons, the HHC Justice Programme prepared a submission for the visit.

The Strasbourg Court has ruled in favour of a former prisoner in a case against Hungary over its arbitrary refusal to allow him to attend the funerals of his mother and brother. This was despite the fact that he had almost no time left to serve on his sentence and that his behaviour had been exemplary. The applicant was represented by the Hungarian Helsinki Committee.

The Hungarian Helsinki Committee (HHC) utilised all human rights CSO tools (research, advocacy, empowerment, strategic litigation, public- and professional awareness raising) to eliminate mandatory glass partitioning between inmates and their family members in Hungarian prisons during visits for seven years. The seven-year-long status quo is currently changing.

The aim of the Hungarian Helsinki Committee’s project is to improve the quality of contact in prisons. The preservation of family ties is fundamental to the reintegration of prisoners, so it is not only in … Read more

The Hungarian Helsinki Committee coordinated a coalition of three civil society organisations (CSOs) working in Hungary to contribute to General Comment 27 of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child (UN CRC), which focuses on children’s rights to access to justice and effective remedies. In its draft General Comment, the CRC aims to clarify the terms, approaches and actions that States should take to implement the right of all children to access to justice and effective remedies when their rights under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child fail to be respected.

Since 2017, the Hungarian National Penitentiary Administration ordered prisons to conduct the most common prison visits in groups where several detainees and their visitors are separated by a plastic partition, a so-called plexiglass wall, under control, regardless of their security classification, without an individual risk assessment. Any physical contact between detainees and their visitors is strictly prohibited. In October 2023, the European Court of Human Rights found that this general practice violates the right to respect for private and family life – Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

The HHC has long been reporting on issues related to unnecessary restrictions of detainees’ contact with the outside world to the CPT. For the past years, there has been a systemic overuse of COVID-lockdown measures … Read more

We compiled a factsheet on issues hindering good family contact of detainees in Hungary. Why is detainees’ contact with the outside world important? Contact with family members promotes the reintegration of prisoners and the prevention … Read more

Visits to penitentiaries have been banned for more than a year since the outbreak of the pandemic in Hungary. Consequently, no personal contact has burdened detainees and their family members. Alternative forms of communication, such … Read more