8 May 2025 | Europe and Central Asia, Hungary, News and features
This week, academics from all over Europe are gathering at the Times Higher Education Europe Universities Summit in Budapest.
The conference has the strapline, “Pairing higher education excellence with world-leading research and innovation” and professors and academics including a pro-vice chancellor of Oxford University Anne Trefethen are speaking.
So far, so dull. Except behind the headlines, this appears to be an expensive exercise in academia washing, with Times Higher Education having struck a deal with the Hungarian government to rehabilitate the reputation of Hungary’s universities, with the conference seemingly being a key part of that strategy.
This is a tale of once-respected institutions being captured by power and money. Ancient Hungarian universities taken over by the cronies of an autocratic government that wants to control what is taught and researched, and a respected and once independent UK higher education magazine, bought by a private equity company keen to monopolise on the magazine’s most valuable asset – its global universities ranking list. The biggest losers: those who believe in academic freedom.
Hungary has been under increasingly autocratic rule since the leader of the Fidesz party, Viktor Orbán, became prime minister in 2010. Orbán has spent the past 15 years bringing independent institutions in the country under the control of his party. Public broadcast channels have been turned into propaganda machines and oligarchs with ties to the government have bought up most private media outlets. According to the latest country report from Reporters Without Borders (RSF), those oligarchs now own 80% of the media.
Orbán and his party have now turned their attention to universities. In 2017, Orbán’s first move was to pass a law (subsequently found to be unlawful under EU legislation) that effectively banned the Central European University from operating in Hungary. The CEU’s main crime was to be independent, a US institution and founded by the financier George Soros.
Orbán then turned his attention to troublesome domestic universities. In 2021, the government transferred 11 state universities and billions of euros of state assets to asset management “foundations” run by loyalists of the Fidesz party. Orbán claimed that this guaranteed the independence of state universities, while most people saw the move as a way of giving Fidesz loyalists a stranglehold on academia. Another slew of universities were later “foundationalised”, meaning they are also now managed and funded by foundations rather than directly by the state, and the small number of public universities remaining in Hungary are now starved of funds. For academic freedom, foundationalisation was disastrous. Hungary’s universities have plummeted to the bottom 20 to 30% of this year’s Academic Freedom Index (along with Chad, Libya, Vietnam and Djibouti).
The takeover and asset stripping of most of Hungary’s state universities by friends of the government set the country on a collision course with the EU. In early 2023, the European Commission excluded 21 of the privatised universities (though not individual academics) from EU Horizon Europe funding for research and innovation, and from Erasmus+ funding for academic mobility, over concerns around corruption and public procurement. Hungary challenged the ruling, but in December 2024, the European Commission upheld its decision. Increasingly isolated and now a pariah in the academic world, the Hungarian government desperately needed help to rehabilitate the image of its universities.
The Times Higher Education (THE) Supplement has an illustrious history. It was founded in 1971 and was a sister paper to the Times Educational Supplement (TES), part of The Times stable. The first editor Brian MacArthur recruited some of the most talented young journalists of their generation including Christopher Hitchens, Peter Hennessy, David Henke and Robin McKie to report on the growing university and polytechnic sector in the UK.
With the early 1990s, came university league tables. By 2019, and several venture capital owners later, THE was carved out from the TES family and taken over by the private equity company Inflexion. Why? Because THE’s Global University Rankings had become big business, influencing everything from university funding and student numbers to UK student visas. There is a lot of money to be made in offering consultancy to universities to help them improve their place in the rankings, or in the words of THE’s website: “we have experienced a growing demand for bespoke, practical insights to help universities and governments alike drive strategic planning and growth across a range of interests in higher education.”
In April 2024, the Hungarian government’s Ministry of Culture and Innovation and THE signed a “groundbreaking deal” . THE, under the leadership of its chief global affairs officer Phil Baty, said it was going to “carry out a detailed analysis of Hungary’s higher education system, analysing its current performance and benchmarking it with successful global education hubs based on THE’s gold standard World University Rankings and review this in light of the ministry’s ambitions”.
Hungary’s Minister of Culture and Innovation Balázs Hankó was more explicit, saying the aspiration was to increase the number of foreign students at Hungarian universities, and have a Hungarian university in the world’s top 100 by 2030. Luckily for Hungary, academic freedom is not one of the measures used in THE’s rankings system.
THE’s deal with Hungary did receive some attention but only on specialist websites such as University World News, which highlight the conflict of interest between running a rankings system and a consultancy to help universities improve their rankings. THE is not the only rankings organisation to do this; QS also run a rankings system and consultancy, but in THE’s case there’s a potential further conflict because the company still publishes an online magazine which is one of the most trusted sources of information in the higher education sector, especially in the UK. Additionally, THE has also recently acquired Inside Higher Ed and Poets&Quants, both large US-based higher education publishers and sources of news.
A research paper by King’s College from 2022, From newspaper supplement to data company: Tracking rhetorical change in the Times Higher Education’s rankings coverage, tracked how over the past 20 years, THE had gradually prioritised being a data company over a journalistic outlet. And what chance is there of THE’s editorial team now running an exposé of Hungary’s university system? Very little, I believe. In fact, in November 2024, THE ran a sympathetic interview with Hungary’s culture minister Hankó without mentioning the contract he had signed with THE’s consultancy arm only months before. However, a cursory search of “Hungary” on THE’s online archive does bring up some past articles that report on and scrutinise the country’s free expression landscape, including a piece from 2017 on the state of higher education in Hungary, and a piece from 2021 on the repercussions of the university privatisation scheme.
Should professors and academics from Oxford and Durham universities and King’s College London be participating in what amounts to an academia-washing exercise by THE and the Hungarian government in Budapest this week? I don’t think so. Ironically, THE columnist Eric Heinze was in two minds about attending a conference about free speech in Hungary back in 2017.
While some in the field believe it is valid for individual universities to buy consultancy services from rankings organisations like THE to help them smooth out problems such as data organisation or ensuring consistent spellings of their name, THE collaborating with authoritarian governments, which have sought to control what their universities can teach, is surely of a different order. What is the point of universities if they are not institutions that can decide their own research and teaching programmes, independent of the government and government appointees?
And surely universities which score badly in the Academic Freedom Index shouldn’t be in the rankings at all. As Donald Trump tries to wrest control of universities in the USA (which regularly top the rankings) and Chinese universities are increasingly shooting up the tables, academic freedom is going to become an increasing issue.
THE is a trusted source of news in higher education, as is the US equivalent, Inside Higher Education. But there’s a threat to independent journalism, and academic freedom, when the company that owns these magazines collaborates with countries like Hungary, which consistently try to control freedom of expression.
Index on Censorship contacted the Times Higher Education (THE) Supplement press office for comment but aside from an automated acknowledgement email, it did not respond by the time of publishing.
25 Apr 2025 | Algeria, Americas, Canada, Europe and Central Asia, Hungary, Middle East and North Africa, News and features, United Kingdom, United States, Venezuela
In the age of online information, it can feel harder than ever to stay informed. As we get bombarded with news from all angles, important stories can easily pass us by. To help you cut through the noise, every Friday Index will publish a weekly news roundup of some of the key stories covering censorship and free expression from the past seven days. This week, we cover El Salvador’s plan for a prisoner swap and look at how Hungary has been placed on an EU watchlist.
Political prisoners: Bukele condemned by families of American deportees for Venezuela swap plan
Last week, the Donald Trump administration once again made headlines for wrongfully deporting Maryland resident Kilmar Ábrego García to a jail in El Salvador, and failing to facilitate his return. The president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, has become a prominent figure in this story, aligning himself with Trump and stating that he “does not have the power” to return Garcia to the USA – a claim that experts say is false.
Now, Bukele has proposed a deal to send 252 Venezuelans incarcerated in El Salvador (following deportation from the US) back to their home country, in exchange for Salvadoran “political prisoners” currently held in Venezuela. President Nicolas Maduro has stated that the Venezuelan nationals held in Salvadoran prisons were “kidnapped”, while Bukele has accused Maduro of imprisoning political opponents and activists.
These Venezuelans, many of whom are believed to have no criminal background and were deported on evidence as spurious as having tattoos, have now become pawns in a game of politics – which both their families and human rights groups alike have denounced. Nelson Suárez, whose brother is among those Venezuelans imprisoned in El Salvador, told The Guardian that he feels his brother is being treated “like political merchandise”.
Under surveillance: Hungary clashes with EU over use of facial recognition tech for LGBTQ+ Pride attendees
Last month, Hungary passed a law that banned LGBTQ+ pride marches in the country, with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán stating that he “won’t let woke ideology endanger our kids.” This move sparked outrage, with opposition leaders lighting flares in parliament and demonstrators taking to the streets of Budapest. Now, one aspect of the law has drawn further ire.
The new legislation allows the use of biometric cameras by police for facial recognition and tracking of LGBTQ+ demonstrators and those attending Pride gatherings, which Politico reports could be in breach of the EU’s newly adopted Artificial Intelligence (AI) Act.
The European Commission is currently investigating whether this is the case, which has increased existing tensions between the EU and Hungary’s leadership.
This is just the latest threat to democratic rights in Hungary – last week, parliament rushed through a bill to allow passports of dual citizens to be revoked if they are perceived to have acted “in the interest of foreign powers” and to have “undermined the sovereignty of Hungary”. The bill’s passing through parliament has drawn fears about how it could be abused to strip dissenters of their citizenship.
AI deep fakes: False videos of James Bulger circulate on social media
While AI is being used against the public in Hungary, closer to home in the UK, public-generated AI videos have taken a concerning new turn – social media content creators are using AI to create “avatars” of murder victims describing their own deaths.
One harrowing example includes depictions of James Bulger, the two-year-old boy who was abducted and murdered in 1993. Fake videos are being generated that portray Bulger himself describing the details of the crime – content which Bulger’s mother, Denise Fergus, has described as “absolutely disgusting”.
Fergus is pushing for a new law to be passed that would prohibit the creation and sharing of this sort of AI content. Such videos are becoming increasingly prevalent online, with some accounts creating likenesses for multiple murder cases.
Index’s CEO Jemimah Steinfeld spoke to the BBC this week, stating that these videos already break existing laws, and that there is a concern that further regulation could restrict legitimate, legal content.
Steinfeld said that while we should “avoid a knee-jerk reaction that puts everything in this terrible box”, she sympathises with Fergus. “To have to relive what she’s been through, again and again, as tech improves, I can’t imagine what that feels like.”
Imprisoned for a hashtag: Algeria clamps down against peaceful online activism
Amnesty International has condemned the Algerian government for its continued moves to repress online activism within the country.
The organisation reports that at least 23 activists and journalists have been arrested and convicted for human rights activism and protests over the past five months, with a focus on the use of the hashtag “Manich Radi” (“I am not satisfied”), which first came to prominence in December 2024.
The hashtag started being used after the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, with many Algerians reportedly drawing similarities between the situations in Syria and Algeria and becoming hopeful of a fight for democracy in their nation.
But Algerian authorities responded to this with swift arrests, and have continued their campaign against those posting the hashtag. Algeria’s President Abdelmadjid Tebboune said of the online movement: “Let no one think that Algeria can be devoured by a hashtag”.
Academic asylum: American professors seek refuge in Canada
Hundreds of Canadian professors have urged the Canadian government to open its doors to “academic refugees” from the USA amid President Trump’s attack on universities and education.
CTV News reported this week that more than 500 Canadian university faculty members had signed an open letter calling for greater funding to Canada’s higher education system and programmes to allow more foreign professors and academics to resettle in the country, to fight the “rising anti-intellectualism” in the USA.
This follows a continuing stream of reports of American academics looking to seek exile in Canada as their professions come under fire by the Trump administration. Many US universities have seen increasing restrictions, most notably Harvard University, which is currently locked in a major funding dispute with the US federal government. The university’s president Alan Garber told NBC that he is “very concerned about Harvard’s future”.
University professors across the country are equally as concerned about the future of education in the USA. One such professor is Jason Stanley, professor of philosophy at Yale University. Stanley, who has written multiple books about fascism, recently accepted a position at the University of Toronto. He told the Daily Nous that he was leaving the USA to “raise my kids in a country that is not tilting towards a fascist dictatorship”.
4 Apr 2025 | Americas, Europe and Central Asia, Hungary, News and features, United States
When Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán delivered his annual state of the nation speech in February, he declared the Trump administration was an inspiration.
But if you look at Orbán’s record you can see that the Hungarian prime minister could actually be the inspiration for Donald Trump’s recent manoeuvres. Orbán was bullying universities, threatening the free press and raging against LGBTQ+ rights way before the second Trump administration started taking aim at those things.
Orbán sees Trump as a “comrade-in-arm[s]” and well he might, as the Trump plan has plenty of resonance with what the Hungarian leader enacted after his second election win in 2010. If Trump had been studying what Orbán had achieved and jotted down notes, he could easily be following the same tick box list of opponents.
Take note of the similarities in language. Orbán talks of: “Pseudo-NGOs, bought journalists, judges, prosecutors, politicians, foundations, bureaucrats – an entire machine that operates the liberal opinion dictatorship and political oppression in the Western world”. This sounds awfully like a Trump speech.
But here’s the thing; Orbán was way ahead of Trump 2.0 in closing down cash flows to universities, which he saw as breeding grounds for opinions he didn’t like.
In 2021, Orbán massively overhauled the way Hungary’s universities were run. A new law meant that 11 universities passed out of state hands and became foundations instead with supervisory boards of politically like-minded people, excluding anyone with “internalist” or “globalist” views, the prime minister said. Several members of the government at the time were installed on these boards including foreign minister Peter Szijjarto. Opposition figures accused Orbán’s government of wanting to control what was taught and researched. “They want ideological control over the universities,” Jozsef Palinkas, a former member of Orbán’s Fidesz party and president of the Academy of Sciences told the German news outlet Deutsche Welle at the time.
The highly ranked Central European University had already been forced to move its main campus out of Hungary and relocate to Austria in 2019, because of the Orbán government’s continuous attacks on it and its founder, the Hungarian-born, US-based George Soros.
Does this all sound familiar? Trump is in the first round of a bloody battle with US universities, demanding removal of diversity programmes, crackdowns on student protests, and possible changes to the syllabus.
Already this is bearing fruit. The University of California has agreed to drop a policy where new staff had to fill in a statement about how they would contribute to diversity on campus. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has cut $400 million in research grants from Columbia University. Trump’s team are linking the cuts to criticism that the institution had not done enough to crack down on antisemitism by allowing pro-Gaza protests. Fearful of what might happen next, Columbia has caved to Trump’s threats and has already agreed to give its campus police more power to arrest student protesters and to replace those running its Middle Eastern studies department.
While there were rumblings about the “liberal elite” running US universities during Trump 1.0, these vague threats mostly came to nothing. This time, though, the attack on the university sector is wholehearted. It partly stems from a belief of Trump’s MAGA (Make America Great Again) Republicans that universities and any critical media are part of a bastion of oppression for those with right-wing values. Such a deep and dangerous attack on US universities and their academic freedom via their research funding has never been attempted with this vigour.
Back in 2021, now vice-president J.D. Vance gave plenty of warning about what might happen next, when he outlined why the Republicans had to take action against “hostile institutions” who control “what we call truth”. Vance said: “If any of us want to do the things that we want to do for our country … we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.” That’s clearly what’s happening now.
Amelia Hadfield, head of the department of politics at Surrey University in the UK, said: “Trump is following a long-established autocratic playbook. Dictatorial heads of state including Orbán have for years provided a populist-led model based on a sharp ideological tilt to the right, filleting their state’s reach in terms of social, welfare, and humanitarian and international support whilst repressing anything resembling open debate, let alone criticism.”
Trump has continued his swivel against the liberal media that he began in his first term. He expects uncritical support, otherwise – as The Associated Press (AP) has already experienced – your access to the White House will be removed. Again Orbán had reached this point earlier on, with a plan to get rid of critical media that might get in his way.
While Orbán set the groundwork for creating a pro-rightwing media sphere in Hungary during his first term, the hard work really began when he returned to office in 2010. Orbán set out, with a little help from his friends, to force out, close down or neutralise unfriendly media outlets. International media conglomerates such as Axel Springer sold up and moved out as foreign news outlets were vilified, and government advertising contracts were removed from those that didn’t publish pro-Orbán editorials. Meanwhile, wealthy allies of Orbán bought out significant national and regional media. Suddenly it was possible to find all the same stories with the same angles and headlines in news sources across Hungary, all run by Orbán’s friends.
Orbán and Trump have an awful lot else in common including tough migration programmes and a warm relationship with Russia’s Vladimir Putin. But Trump is moving a lot faster than Orbán did and for those trying to fight back against Trump’s plans to erode media and academic freedoms, one thing they might want at the forefront of their minds is that Orbán has now been in power continuously for 15 years. This is something that Trump might well put on his to-do list, if he can work out how to achieve it.
13 May 2023 | News and features, United Kingdom
The heavy-handed treatment of anti-monarchy protesters at King Charles III’s ceremony is ominous
We are still reeling from the events of last weekend when a series of protesters were arrested in London. The protesters, from the anti-monarchy group Republic, had liaised with the police in advance and been given the green light for their demonstration. Despite this they were arrested as soon as they turned up, with no reason given. They spent the day in jail.
This overreach by the police is, sadly, part of a broader pattern of peaceful protesters and journalists reporting on these protests being arrested, all of which has been exacerbated by the passage last week of the Public Order Act 2023 – which Index has opposed from the get-go.
Commentators have raised the alarm bell. We’re sleep walking into a dictatorship, some have said. Others have warned of the UK turning into an illiberal democracy, like Hungary. So what lessons can we learn from other places that have seen their rights to protest crumble? We asked a series of people – artists, journalists and activists – to share messages with us here.
‘Akrestsina prison wasn’t born in a day’
I read Julian Assange’s letter to King Charles III from HMP Belmarsh. I recognise the prison he describes. 1,768 political prisoners in Belarus recognise it. Thousands of Belarusians who took to the streets for peaceful protests recognise it. The name of the prison is insignificant. When I tell people in so-called “first-world countries” that I spent nine days in prison for a peaceful demonstration in Belarus, they get shocked. We come to these countries for security and protection, because we believe that the rule of law works there. Who will protect their own citizens from their state?
As I followed the news from Coronation day, I questioned: why is the smoothness of the show more important than an individual’s right for freedom of assembly? Why is it so much more important that a bill is passed to make detentions of the organisers legal. They were detained before the protest even began. I remember police in Minsk in 2020 arresting us as we walked from different parts of the city, trying to gather in one spot. I remember the Belarusian oppositional candidate Uladzimir Niakliayeu being beaten up and arrested on his way to the protesters on the post-election night on 19 December 2010. I don’t remember it but I read about the opponents of Lukashenka disappearing in the 90s…
Do you think I’m dramatising and it won’t happen in the UK? Not to that extent? Akrestsina prison, this torture chamber where 53 women were kept in a cell for eight, listening to the screams of men raped with a baton on the corridor, wasn’t born in a day. It is the Frankenstein of a society which disregarded the detentions and calls of activists. Don’t let Britain become Belarus.
Hanna Komar, poet and activist from Belarus
‘Authoritarian governments are watching closely’
After Hong Kong finally lifted its last pandemic restrictions in March this year, the first protests were authorised in more than three years. Ever since coronavirus arrived in the city in January 2020, the pandemic had been used as a pretext for banning demonstrations, giving rise to absurd situations where it was legal to gather in a restaurant in a group of 12 but illegal to congregate outside in groups of more than four. Protests still happened during that time, particularly in response to the introduction of the National Security Law in June 2020, but once the Hong Kong government raised the fine for violating the four-person assembly rule to HK$5,000 (£500), many people were deterred. Nonetheless, a blind eye was turned to larger groups who turned out to support the government.
When it became legal to protest again, there were a lot of strings attached, often literally. In March protesters against a proposed land reclamation project and waste-processing facility were forced to wear number tags and walk in a cordoned-off line with heavy police presence, while the organisers had to agree not to exceed the permitted 100 participants. Another march, for women’s rights, was cancelled by organisers after police said there was a risk of violence. Former members of the now-disbanded Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions called off a May Day march after one of the organisers was harassed by police.
The right to protest in Hong Kong is now severely circumscribed, to the point that to do so is to invite police attention designed to deter turning out. The National Security Law has also had a chilling effect on people, who might be fearful of losing their job if they take to the streets. The Hong Kong government continues to claim there is freedom of assembly but, like many freedoms in the city these days, it is highly conditional, even hollow.
Tens of thousands of Hongkongers have moved abroad in the past few years, to Taiwan and Singapore, and also to Western countries, including the UK. For many, it is a refuge away from the deteriorating situation back home. But some are also conscious of how things are not perfect in their new adopted countries. The UK’s Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act, with its emphasis on disruption, has aspects that are similar to restrictions back in Hong Kong, while in France, many have been shocked by the brutality of the police in repressing protests against the government’s pension reform law. Unlike in Hong Kong, there is still the possibility of legal recourse against these measures, but Western countries ought to be aware how their repressive tools undermine their own criticism of governments such as China’s and Hong Kong’s. When British police arrest anti-monarchy protesters, authoritarian governments are watching closely, and are only too happy and eager to use this as a justification, however disingenuously, next time they round up protesters on their own turf.
Tammy Lai-Ming Ho, poet from Hong Kong
‘Continue standing up for your voice’
Hungary has a long history of protests. In March 1848, a group of intellectuals kicked off a demonstration against the Habsburg empire, which led to the creation of the dual monarchy after a year-long fight. In 1956, university students sparked a mass protest against the USSR, in which over 2,000 people were killed, but which ultimately resulted in a softer governance. It was a series of protests that led to the toppling of Hungary’s last socialist PM, Ferenc Gyurcsány, too, following the leaking and broadcasting of a profane and controversial speech in 2006. A young right-wing party, Fidesz, organised multiple protests.
Ultimately, these events and Fidesz’s role contributed to the election of party chair Viktor Orbán in 2010. Since then, he has been leading the country into an increasingly anti-democratic future, including cracking down on protesters’ rights.
The country has witnessed plenty of protests since, despite increasingly strict laws and growing retaliation. In the latest, students marched against the restrictions of freedom of teachers. Two events, held one week apart in April and May, were both ended by the police spraying tear gas, in some cases directly in the faces of minors.
The popularity of these protests shows that the Hungarian youth isn’t keen on standing down and giving in to a future without voice, joining youth around the world, be it protesting against monarchy, for pensions or human rights.
Videos of this protest see visibly young people tearing down the metal fence in the Buda Castle, climbing on buildings and chanting the mantra of protests around the world: we won’t allow this.
“This shows that we got under someone’s skin, we started doing something… And maybe we will get even more under their skin,” one young protester said when asked why she persists, by the independent portal Telex.hu. Perhaps this should be a message for all protesters around the world: to continue standing up for your voice and displease those who are trying to take it away.
Lili Rutai, journalist from Hungary
