Interalia

The Rainbow Mission Foundation (the organizer of the annual LGBT festival) and PATENT (People Against Patriarchy – an NGO) intend to make a complaint against the police because of their actions during and before the festival. According to the organizers of the 15th LGBT festival, the police wanted to intimidate them.

Two weeks before the Pride March (which took place on 10th July), the police recommended to the organizers that the march should be shortened: it should stop at Oktogon and then turn back to Hősök tere. They explained that they would not have enough cordons because of the flood prevention going on in the country. “We hoped that the police would do everything they could to guarantee our security along this short route,” Sándor Steigler (organizer, Rainbow Mission Foundation) says.

When asked by a television channel, the police subsequently denied that they had referred to the flood prevention.

“We were constantly under pressure,” Steigler says. The police asked for 400 volunteers (which means two times as much as the law requires: 10%), but they still told, only two hours before the march, that they would not employ cordons at all. The police commisioner in charge soon modified this and told that they would use the cordons in case they would be needed. In the end, the side streets were defended by the use of cordons. When the march was getting close to the Oktogon, four “Hungarian fighters” appeared from nowhere, and stopped the pride truck. The police removed them but told the organizers that they would have to turn back before the Oktogon because of the extremists shouting at the end of the street.

According to Éva Simon, an expert on the right of assembly working for TASZ (Society for Human Rights), once the police and the organizers agreed upon a route, the police would have had to secure the whole of it against the extremists. The police has not given information on whether the counter-demonstration had been reported or not. In case it had been, the police should have had to designate a venue so that it would not disturb the pride march. In case it had not been reported, the police should have had to secure that the pride march reached its designated end.

Participants had other problems with the police, too. During the opening of the festival on 4th July, a young man was attacked and slapped in the face by a member of a group wearing right wing extremist badges. The incident happened very close to the main venue of the festival: the Művész movie theatre. The police asked to see the papers of the offended man. On the same evening, two gay men from Australia were also attacked. “One of them had his nose broken, and the police treated this as a case of physical injury, which is a grave mistake. Instead of investigating the case as a hate motivated crime, the police told the victims that they could file a private complaint. This is a case of mistaken qualification. Following the attacks against the pride march in 2008, the legislation widened the scope of violent attacks against communities and their members. This applies to the members of the LGBT community, too,” Éva Simon says. Balázs Dénes, the chair of TASZ adds: “We see that the police is usually reluctant to investigate cases of hate motivated incidents. This was the case in 2008 and 2009, too, in cases of attacks against participants of the pride march, but it is also typical when Roma people are attacked. The problem is that the police does not have a protocol for the investigation of such crimes, even though they require a special form of investigation. The victims of hate crimes are not treated proffessionally either.”

According to Steigler, it is not only a legal and procedural protocol that is missing. He thinks that members of the police should take part in special trainings on LGBT issues, so that they can learn how to treat victims in these cases. “We think that the police should be trained. This would help their work, too, so that they can really serve and defend communities.” According to Gábor Kuszing, a member of PATENT, the police should start by admitting their mistakes. “Otherwise there’s no sense in negotiating, as only public legal proceedings can bring about changes in the police,” he said. The police did not comment this either.

Source:
Mária Sánta: “Malfunction. The Police at the Budapest Pride.” In: Magyar Narancs, 2010. Nr. 31 (5 August), p. 15.