The court also found the violation in a second-instance decision in the case of investigator Márton Bene, who sued the newspaper, but reduced the complaint rate to a quarter.

The Metropolitan Trial Panel sentenced the Observer in a final judgment because it alleged falsehoods on the investigator Márton Bene and therefore caused him non-pecuniary damage, writes the Hungarian Helsinki Committee.

Two years ago, in the online version of the pro-government weekly Monitor a Immigration, homosexual rights and gender studies: these are the most employed by the staff of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences Named Márton Bene in its compilation, the article stated that “there are staff in workshops reserved for taxpayer money that have not been published academically for years, but it also turns out that research on gender and homosexuality issues is remarkably popular.”

Martin Bene had no problems with the Observer due to his research direction or “liberal bias”, he was blacklisted because he says he doesn’t publish much about his scientific results.

According to a statement by the Helsinki Committee, the article recorded as a fact that the last study by the political scientist was in 2016, establishing the researcher as someone who had not been doing anything for almost two years living on taxpayer money. In comparison, in 2017, 8 and until June of this year, 4 of his publications were included in the database of public academic publications (MTMT), which was supposedly studied by the Observer journalist. In addition, he has been published in 6 international journals out of a total of 12 studies, and in 2017 he won the award for best publication from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences for one of his previous writings.

The investigator reported on the manipulation based on falsehood on Facebook, and the next day the part about him disappeared from the newspaper’s portal. But by then, several websites had already seized “information”. Márton Bene, a client of the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, petitioned the court to discover that Figyelő had violated his right to reputation by making a false statement and to order the publisher to pay eight hundred thousand damages and pay compensation on the portal home page .

Last year, in the first instance, the lawsuit was confirmed by the Metropolitan Court. However, the recent final judgment partially changed this and reduced the damages from HUF 800,000 to HUF 200,000. In addition, he forced Bene to pay a total fee of 56,000 HUF. This, according to Helsinki, means that if he had also had to pay a lawyer’s fees for legal representation, he would have had to pay in the end after two years because he lied about it and therefore sued.

According to the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, in addition to the 2020 value ratios, no deterrent effect can be exerted with such damages on bodies that are otherwise full of public funds and regularly lose claims due to lies, especially if such claims they last almost two years.

Two months ago, a lawsuit against the Observer also failed, but then another article. In it, NGO employees who appear weekly as “Soros mercenaries” violate their privacy rights.


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Civilians, whom the newspaper called “Soros mercenaries”, were jointly represented by the Hungarian Helsinki Committee and the Society for Freedoms.