Helsinki File: Right to family life

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.

Everyone’s right to family life and family unity regardless of nationality, ethnicity, or any other status has long been recognised in international human rights law, international refugee law and EU law. When people flee their … Read more

The Hungarian Helsinki Committee was granted leave to submit a third-party intervention in the case of R.M. and Others v. Poland. The case concerns a Russian family with small children who were detained in Poland … Read more

The Hungarian Helsinki Committee has published a short information leaflet on family reunification in seven languages with the support of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee. The leaflet can be downloaded from the below links: Information … Read more

New report on the implementation of the right to family reunification for people in need of international protection in the European Union.

This short handbook aims at providing refugees and beneficiaries of subsidiary protection with necessary information in 5 languages.

In recent years, Somali refugees and beneficiaries of subsidiary protection who have been granted protection in Hungary have faced insurmountable difficulties when trying to be reunited with their family members in Hungary.