1. Mission and goals of NANE Women's Rights Association

NANE, Women's Rights Association was founded by eleven volunteers as a non-profit, non-governmental charity organization in January 1994. It achieved the legal status of "Important Charity Organization for the Public Good" in 1999.

NANE is primarily dedicated to ending the human rights violations and the threat of violence against women (VAW) and children through advocacy, personal support services and public education. Our goal is to facilitate and promote changes in the laws and legal regulations so that they will be better able to provide legal protection for women against discrimination and violence; to facilitate and encourage the creation of presently missing protocols related to all fields of VAW; to improve legal practice so that it will stop discriminating against women; to empower women to be better able to represent their own issues and to be better able to name their realities.

NANE is based on the principles voiced in the international human rights and women's rights treaties, such as the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), the New York Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others, the Beijing Platform of Action and the 1993 UN General Assembly Resolution on the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women.

We wish to achieve the above goals through the following activities:

The following activities were introduced in 2003:

NANE cooperates with NGOs that share our principles on women's rights and non-discrimination.

2. History and accomplishments

Since its establishment in February 1994, NANE has been maintaining an independent NGO role. The hotline, the organization's very first program, has been operating ever since, seven days a week, four hours daily. The hotline is staffed by volunteers. Volunteers have to complete our own 60-hour training course that provides theoretical and practical information necessary for hotline work, and a 20-hour practice on the hotline. The first volunteers were trained by a training teem of highly experienced American and Croatian volunteers. Currently the training course is held by our own trainers twice a year.

At any given time, the organization has around 15 volunteers to staff the hotline. Upon the completion of the training those who find that they would rather not work on the hotline, have the opportunity to chose other volunteer work at the organization. The principles to be observed on the hotline towards the callers is to be non-judgmental, empowering, process (as opposed to results) oriented, non-pressuring, and not to make decisions for the caller. We also have a strict non-discrimination policy that each and every volunteer and staff member is required to observe. (Most common, and therefore most important points in Hungary are prejudices against the Roma, Jews, Arabs, and sexual minorities.)

Right after the setting up of the organization, two important issues needed public activity: one was the campaign for a change in the Penal Code to outlaw marital rape, the other was a petition to the President of Hungary to grant remission for a woman convicted for killing her extremely abusive husband who was never stopped by the police. Both campaigns were successful. With the growth of the organization, the scope of our activities widened considerably, and at the moment it encompasses the activities mentioned above.

Our most recent far-reaching campaign targeted the legislative and law-enforcement bodies:

In the fall of 2002 NANE was one of three NGOs launching a signature-collection campaign for effective legislation on, and the implementation of, an effective national strategy to combat DV. The campaign was based on grass-roots activists throughout the country, and by the end of November, more than 40,000 signatures were collected.

Related to the campaign NANE organized street-demonstrations in order to raise awareness and keep the issue on the agenda. The first of those was a Silent Witnesses demonstration with candles in one of the most busy squares of Budapest on All Saints' Day, 2002. The Silent Witnesses are red, life sized silhouettes commemorating women killed in DV. The figures carry the short story of a person. The second street activity, held on 24 November 2002, the eve of the International 16 Days of Activism Against Violence Against Women, was the first speak-out on DV ever held in Hungary. More than a hundred people marched from the building of the Supreme Court of Hungary to the building of the Hungarian Parliament carrying the Silent Witnesses. In front of the Parliament survivors of DV and relatives of victims killed in DV told their stories to an audience consisting of Members of the Parliament, members of ministries, police officers, activists and volunteers of a dozen different NGOs, sympathizers, friends, and the media. The start and the end point of the march were chosen to represent two major shortcomings of the Hungarian legal system when it comes to remedies against VAW: the missing laws and the uninformed, insensitive and often biased court practice. It is closely connected to the practice of the police which often does not even allow cases to get to court.

The campaign resulted in a Parliamentary Resolution in April, 2003 instructing the Ministry of Justice to prepare law proposals on the issue, and in a Police Order issued by the Chief of the Hungarian Police on the effective handling of DV cases. The NGOs that participated in the campaign had a chance to express their views on the drafts of the Police Order. The methods for the collection of official police and prosecution statistics were also somewhat improved, though they need further amendments.