The Right to Know 2

As explored in The Right to Know project in 2021, evoking national security concerns have become a blanket authorisation for some EU Member States to exclude asylum seekers and refugees from protection, reject or withdraw residence permits of third-country nationals, expel, or arbitrarily detain them in immigration detention, sometimes indefinitely, without any meaningful control and without giving them the possibility to know at least the summary of the reasons why they are considered a threat to national security. This deprives them from any possibility of effective remedy and opens avenues for an uncontrolled, even abusive use of this argument for states with already questionable human rights and rule of law records (such as Hungary or Poland). Thus this two-year project (running from 2023 to 2024) will have a wider, pan-European focus to map the issues related to access to classified data in national security immigration cases and to gather good practices.

The project will reach its impact through using a multi-faceted skill-set:

• a pan-European mapping study will be carried out;
• a policy brief will be developed to target EU-level and international advocacy targets;
• an online training will be organised for Council of Europe Member States;
• and practitioners in Hungary and Poland will be directly targeted through an in-person training course about the topic.

Project duration: 1 January 2023 – 31 December 2024

The Hungarian Helsinki Committee is coordinating this project in collaboration with the European Council on Refugees and Exiles (ECRE) and the Polish Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights (HFHR). The project is funded by the European Programme for Integration and Migration (EPIM).

NEWS:

• Russian woman who fled to Hungary from the secret services cannot be deprived of her refugee status without a clear reason.
  (You can read her story here.)