Freedom House democracy rating for Hungary slips, country near bottom in region

The press in Hungary enjoys total freedom, there is no cause for concern, an official of government communications, told MTI after Freedom House published a report with declined press freedom ratings on Tuesday.

Zoltan Kovacs said the report contradicted the European Commission’s earlier assessments of Hungary’s new media laws as well as the organisation’s own May report on press freedom in Hungary.

The US-based human rights watchdog Freedom House (FH) had given Hungary lower ratings in several areas of democratic development assessed in its annual report published on Monday.

The Nations in Transit 2011 report said democratic governance and media independence in Hungary had suffered serious damage over the past year. The report attributes the slide to the government’s passage of new controversial media laws.

On a scale of 1 to 7, with 1 the top score, Hungary’s democracy score worsened from 2.39 in 2009 to 2.61 by 2010, the report said. Among eight countries classified as “consolidated democracies”, Hungary fared at the bottom, below Slovakia (2.54), Lithuania (2.25), Poland (2.21), Czech Republic (2.18), Latvia (2.14), Slovenia (1.93) and Estonia (1.93).

The report states that “although Hungarian media can still be considered generally free and diverse, (…), new media legislation that introduced fundamental reforms raised serious concerns in 2010. It drastically curtailed the independence of public-service television and radio broadcasters, and established a new regulatory body with sweeping authority over broadcast media, print publications, and the internet. Due to this alarming concentration of political power over the media, Hungary’s rating for independent media declines from 2.75 to 3.25.”

FH gave Hungary’s judiciary independence a rating of 2.25, compared to 2.00 last year. It said “the parliamentary majority overruled a judgment by the Constitutional Court and curtailed the court’s jurisdiction over budgetary legislation”.

Civil society received a rating of 2.00 this year, compared to 1.75 last year, citing the government’s move to freeze finances and bidding for several cultural and research organisations.

Scores in the areas of electoral process (1.75), local democratic governance (2.50) and corruption (3.50) remained level from last year, the report said.