Legal aid
TASZ is a civil liberties organization. If you feel that the state or its institutions have violated your rights, you can turn to us for advice. We cannot help you with labour disputes, migration law issues, divorce, child support, neighbourhood or business law issues, or other matters where it is not a state body violating your rights. Please review our detailed topic list before contacting us.
What topics can we help with?
- freedom of speech and press, right to assembly, civil disobedience;
- state surveillance;
- healthcare self-determination rights (especially abortion, home birth, the right to refuse treatment, the right to leave an institution); our organizations does not deal with medical malpractice cases;
- guardianship procedures concerning the preservation or restoration of legal capacity (including electoral rights);
- rights violations against persons with disabilities or psychiatric patients living in institutions;
- the right to education for children with disabilities of compulsory age;
- emergency and involuntary psychiatric treatment;
- violations of the patients’ rights of people living with HIV;
- patients’ rights (especially the right to information and to maintain contact);
- discrimination in healthcare or education, in relation to drugs, disability, Roma identity, social status or poverty;
- child protection procedures, child displacement due to poverty;
- electoral rights and eligibility;
- freedom of information requests, right to access to public information (for journalists as well);
- whistleblowing and municipal activism;
- protection of whistleblowers;
- protection of personal data, when related to healthcare, drugs, education, or child protection (e.g., access to medical records, data concerning worldview or political affiliation);
- minor drug-related offences (small amounts);
- freedom of curriculum.
How to reach us?
By phone
Our legal aid hotline is available on Tuesdays from 1:00-3:00 p.m. and Thursdays from 10:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. at +36-1-279-2235.
If your call is related to:
- protests and other forms of demonstrations, expression of opinion
- protection of personal data
- freedom of information, civic participation
- freedom of the press, protecting journalists
- electoral rights, elections
- freedom of conscience and faith,
please press number two.
And if your call is related to:
- healthcare
- education
- discrimination
- racist, homophobic attacks, hatecrime
- women’s right to make decisions about their bodies (eg. regarding giving birth, or abortion)
- the rights of disabled people and that of their family members
- the rights of people living with a psychiatric diagnosis
- social services and child protection
- people living with HIV
- agency, end-of-life decisions
- drug users’ rights,
please press number three.
We cannot assist you with labour disputes, divorce, child support, neighbourhood or business law matters, or other cases where a state body is not involved. Please review the detailed topic list before calling us.
By email
Send the details of your case and all relevant documents to jogsegely@tasz.hu.
We reply to all messages, but due to high demand, this may take several weeks.
If you urgently need legal aid – e.g., concerning protest notification, involuntary psychiatric treatment, or child removal – make sure to include this in the subject line.
If you want to send an encrypted email, use TASZ’s public key for encryption. It can be accessed here: https://tasz.hu/titkos_kulcs.
By post
We primarily provide legal aid by phone or email, so we kindly ask you to contact us that way. If you can only send a letter, please include an email address or phone number so we can reach you.
Our postal address: 1136 Budapest, Tátra utca 15/B
Do not send original documents by post, as we cannot keep or return them.
In person
We only provide in-person legal aid in Debrecen, Pécs, Miskolc, and Szeged. More details are available on our Regional Program page in Hungarian.
Please note: There is no in-person legal aid or client reception at our Budapest office, so do not visit us without prior arrangement.
On our hotline
We operate a phone hotline during larger protests and election campaigns.
During protests, our hotline can be reached at +36 30 722 3356 (we will provide more detailed information on when exactly you can reach us during these events on our social media channels).
Personal legal aid outside of Budapest
The aim of our Regional Program is to bring legal protection closer to those who need our help, and for us to find out more about the problems that concern them.
Important!
We do our best to respond to everybody through our legal aid service. However, if we advise you once, that doesn’t mean that we can represent you in any legal proceedings, or that we can provide you with advice throughout the entirety of the case. Please do consider this before getting in touch with us.
When are we not able to advise you?
- If you already have a lawyer
- If you’re not in a dispute with the state, but with a private individual or a non-public organization, for example a corporation
This means that we’re not able to help with matters concerning family law (divorce, child custody), assault cases, and enforcement issues, because these are not our fields of expertise.
If you didn’t find what you were looking for among our topics, click on this table (in Hungarian) where we’ve collected all organizations that we know of and that you can turn to for help.
You can find our privacy policy regarding emails and documents sent to the TASZ legal aid service here, and our archiving policy here.
