“I will not bring 18-year-old Afghans to the Czech Republic because I consider it a security risk,” said Czech Interior Minister Jan Hamáček of the Social Democrats at the beginning of the year, when the country was asked to take in 40 unaccompanied migrants and refugees from Greece’s overflowing refugee camps. He had reiterated different variations on that position before then and has repeated them since, most recently after the blaze that razed the Moria camp on the island of Lesbos to the ground, leaving thousands of unaccompanied minors and hundreds of parents accompanying their children homeless.

“Shall we occupy the university?” “Yes!” cheered a roomful of applauding students from Hungary’s University of Theatre and Film Arts (SZFE), surrounded by the sound of drums, over a week ago. They then proceeded to block the entrance with the red and white stripes that have since become the symbol of a resistance movement supporting the autonomy of the SZFE and standing up against a further attack by Viktor Orbán’s conservative, nationalist Government on the freedom of art, culture and education in Hungary.

On 21 August 2020 the Prague office of Heinrich Böll Stiftung celebrates its 30th anniversary. As the first office of the foundation abroad, it both witnessed and provided support for the long transition of Czechoslovakia, and later the Czech Republic, from the Velvet Revolution through the economic transformation of the 1990’s to Czech membership in the EU and beyond. Also covering activities in Slovakia, Hungary and Croatia, the unique experience and institutional memory of the Prague Office of the Heinrich Böll Stiftung continues to provide valuable support for environmentalism, democracy, and human rights in Central Europe.

On the evening of 24 July, a crowd of 10 000 -15 000 people gathered in front of the office of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to show their solidarity for the journalists who had resigned that very same morning from the largest remaining independent Hungarian news portal.

In the last three months it has become crystal clear that, among other matters, the COVID-19 pandemic in Hungary has taken its toll on a peculiar subject – the rule of law itself.