The pandemic can rule the agenda, but it cannot rule the ideology. This is the main lesson of the past few days in Hungary. The government has introduced restrictions and a crisis management plan, while PM Viktor Orbán has began writing the new chapter of the Hungarian ideological-cultural war in the meantime.
The Law and Justice Party (PiS) has used three consecutive electoral victories in Poland to polarize society around the “gender ideology” issue, leading to the government’s unanimous opposition of every policy proposal that mentions “gender” or “gender equality”.
Addressing and diminishing barriers to the single market in the EU is a much welcome initiative. The initiatives to decrease bureaucracy, to step up efforts to comply with EU law, to evaluate the effects of new regulations on SMEs in impact assessments, and mutual recognition are important steps in promoting growth, free trade, and consumer rights.
After the PiS government declared it is going to “repolonize” media, the US and German ambassadors to Poland, respectively Georgette Mosbacher and Arndt Freytag von Loringhoven, have met to discuss the freedom of press.
On October 22, Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal ruled that abortions for fetal abnormalities violate the Constitution, effectively imposing a near-total ban on abortion. Tribunal’s president Julia Przyłębska said that allowing abortions in cases of fetal abnormality legalized “eugenic practices“.
The regulatory framework of the right to peaceful assembly in Hungary was radically reshaped by a new law enacted in October 2018 by the Parliament where the governing party holds a qualified majority enabling it to modify laws in accordance with its political will.
Zbigniew Ziobro, the Polish Minister of Justice, has vowed to submit a motion aimed at withdrawing Poland from the Istanbul Convention, the Council of Europe´s Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence. He said the Convention contains harmful, ideological elements. He also stressed that Poland is doing just fine with protection of women rights and prevention of domestic violence without the Convention. Ziobro’s deputy Marcin Romanowski added that Poland should drop…
Reflecting and reporting on the impact of the new coronavirus on the ages-old obsessive (in)equality academia, media and others are swinging between claims that SARS-CoV-2 / COVID-19 (the pathogen / the disease) is either a blindfolded leveler or, on the contrary, a balance destroyer.
70 years ago the Czechoslovakian democrat and women’s rights activist Milada Horáková was executed after a Stalinist show trial. Her political activities and her end are a memorial to the victims of totalitarianism of every kind.
The Hungarian parliament voted to end the state of emergency, which gave the government the power to decide by decree on issues related to the COVID-19 pandemic. The emergency legislation adopted in March was heavily criticized because it did not have a clear end date.
