Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban has for years told his country its children are under attack from deviant sexualities and pedophilia. Now, his government is embroiled in a scandal after it emerged that its president had pardoned a man convicted of covering up sexual abuse at a children’s home.
President Katalin Novak, Orban’s loyal but largely impotent ally, resigned last Saturday amid public furor over her decision in April 2023 to pardon the deputy director of a children’s home who had helped to cover up the abuse of underaged boys.
University heavyweights in Hungary and Poland are continuing to decry curbs on academic freedom, as alarm bells sound about increasing restrictions on universities across the EU. Hungary is viewed as the most extreme case of an EU member state limiting academic freedom, as highlighted in the 2018 ruling by the European Court of Justice that the government violated EU law when the Central European University (CEU) was pressured into moving from Budapest to Vienna.