The Tempus Public Foundation (TPF) unlawfully discriminated the Power of Humanity Foundation, ruled the Budapest-Capital Regional Court in its decision of 30 June.
The background of the case is that our foundation, like several other Hungarian NGOs, refused to make the stigmatising declaration required by the unlawful Civic Act. Although the Court of Justice of the European Union has condemned the law, the TPF, which is the Hungarian National Agency of the Erasmus+ programme, required applicants to make the declaration during the application process. We refused to make the declaration so we didn’t get funding for our project, which had previously been considered eligible on the basis of the external assessors’s scores.
We first contacted several European Commissioners and the Erasmus+ programme with the help of the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union and the Hungarian Helsinki Committee with the details of the case. As a result, an investigation was launched and the unlawful statement was removed from the application criteria.
With the help of the two civil rights organisations, we brought legal action, which our foundation has now won in the first instance. The court found that the TPF had violated the Power of Humanity Foundation’s right to equal treatment. According to the court’s decision, the TPF has to pay HUF 600 000 in damages and to publicly apologise on its website and in a statement.
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