Lifelong imprisonment without the possibility of parole (actual life sentence) was introduced into Hungarian criminal law in 1998. Hungary and the UK are the only EU Member States whose legal system makes it possible to impose a so-called “actual life sentence” on perpetrators of serious crimes.
Partly as a result of the HHC’s advocacy efforts, a new body for examining complaints against the police, the Independent Police Complaints Board (IPCB) was established by a June 2007 amendment of the Police Act. … Read more
The Hungarian Helsinki Committee has been advocating for the ratification and the proper implementation of the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture. Below the most important steps and developments of the project can be consulted.
The Hungarian Helsinki Committee takes part in a comparative research project ‘Effective Defence Rights in the European Union and Access to Justice: Investigating and Promoting Best Practices’ project. The project is the initiative of four … Read more
The Hungarian system of complaints against unlawful police action has been criticised being dysfunctional due to systemic and procedural reasons. The most important flaw was that the police rather than an independent body decided all … Read more
The lack of an efficient criminal legal aid system is especially detrimental to indigent pre-trial detainees and defendants in general. Fair and effective access to criminal justice to those who cannot afford to retain a … Read more
ID check is the most frequently used police measure in Hungary: on average, more than 1.5 million checks have been conducted in recent years. However, the practice of ID checks has not been analyzed so far. Therefore, the Hungarian Helsinki Committee sought to assess the typical grounds of ID checks and the efficiency of this police measure in the framework of a project financially supported by the European Commission’s AGIS Program and the Open Society Institute. It was also examined whether there is a discriminatory tendency regarding ID checks, namely if members of the Roma minority are ID checked in unjustified and disproportionate numbers compared to their non-Roma peers.
Analysing the system of ex officio appointed defense counsels
The Hungarian Helsinki Committee’s Police Jail Monitoring Program started in 1996, on the basis of an agreement concluded with the National Police Headquarters. The goal of the project is to monitor the conditions of detention … Read more