ISTANBUL, TURKEY

İstanbul Levent'teki Macaristan Başkonsolosluğu önünde Macaristan'da sokakta yaşaması yasaklanan evsizler için bugün dayanışma eylemi yapıldı. Macaristan'daki evsizleri savunmak için oluşturulan The City For All (Herkes için Kent) isimli grubun çağrısı ile 13-15 Şubat'ta aralarında New York, Lizbon ve Bangkok'un da bulunduğu 12 şehirdeki Macaristan temsilcilikleri önünde eylem düzenleniyor.

Initiated by Hungarian homeless advocacy group The City is for All, local groups in 9 countries are organizing solidarity events to protest against the criminalization of homelessness in Hungary. The persecution of homeless people is in violation of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, the European Convention on Human Rights, and the UN International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

We invite our friends all over the world to join our struggle against the criminalisation of homelessness in Hungary.

The 2010 election brought a comprehensive authoritarian and punitive turn in Hungary: constitutional democracy was essentially abolished; labour rights were curtailed; entitlement to welfare benefits was restricted and a harsh workfare regime was implemented; asylum-seekers became subject to an unjustifiable detention regime; increasingly severe penal policies were introduced with disproportionate sanctions; the surveillance of state employees was authorised on an unprecedented scale. Since the transition to capitalism in 1990, the poverty rate and the level of income inequality have never been as high as now.

Your Holiness:

We are members of The City Is For All, an organization based in Budapest, Hungary, and we are all homeless or struggle with serious issues of housing. We are writing to you because we would like you to know how the Hungarian state treats those homeless who, like many of us, are forced to live in public spaces.

The homeless activists of The City is for All and their allies were holding hands, telling poems and singing around the chairs of the Budapest City Council members in the council’s assembly room at 8.15am on Thursday, November 14^th. The group’s aim was to prevent the assembly from passing an ordinance, which extends the criminalization of homeless people to a major part of the city. With this demonstration, we have made it clear that homelessness is an inacceptable condition, which should be eliminated through social policy and not punitive measures.