Judit Bayer represented HES at a workshop organised by the Eötvös Károly Institute (EKINT) and the Budapest Goethe Institute on 17 October 2017. Participants discussed the interests and responsibility of civil society in defending European values. How can NGO-s secure the common values declared in Article 2 of the European Treaty requesting the European institutions and their own national governments to account how they implement them?
Salil Shetty, Secretary General of the Amnesty International met representatives of Hungarian NGO-s, including István Hegedűs, at L'Office on 12 October 2017.
On 12 September 2017 thirty-one Hungarian NGO-s, including HES, signed a joint declaration to draw the attention of the Organisation for the Security and Cooperation in Europe to the shrinking space for civil society and the obstacles posed by the Hungarian government to the activities of human rights defenders.
On 29 August 2017 HES and twenty-two other NGO-s filed a challenge with Hungary's constitutional court against the discriminative law targeting "foreign-funded" organisations.
Hungarian NGO-s, including the Hungarian Europe Society, started a campaign on 26 April 2017 asking citizens to access Members of the Parliament and to urge them not to vote for the proposed bill that would stigmatise civil groups.
The Hungarian Europe Society was one of the initiators of the demonstration held on 12 April 2017 at Heroes Square in Budapest against the proposed bill that would stigmatise non-governmental organisations.
