Providing legal aid for 12 years
We are the only organization providing legal aid for people living in poverty, .
The Streetlawyer Association (SLA) is made up of volunteer lawyers from many different fields: attorneys, lawyers working in the public administration, trainee lawyers, PhD and law students. What we all have in common is that we all believe that access to justice and equality before the law should be ensured to those who cannot afford to hire a lawyer.
Our main activity is providing legal aid for people living in poverty, especially in homelessness or in poor housing conditions.
Our low-threshold legal aid service is provided for free on a public premise of Budapest. Anyone can write to us or visit our legal aid desk at Blaha Lujza Square. Beyond the personal counseling at Blaha Lujza Square, our services include a hot line and legal aid in email run entirely by volunteers since 2010.
We are not acting on behalf of our clients, but in cooperation with them, trying to enhance their legal awareness and capabilities in the process. All cases matter equally to SLA, but we also take on strategic cases to achieve systemic change on the policy or legal level. During the pandemic we switched to “remote legal aid” by operating daily email (with 4 volunteer lawyers in weekly shifts) and twice a week phone legal aid service.
We often face the deficiencies and injustices of the Hungarian legal system. This is why we are fighting for a just and inclusive society, a society where human rights, especially social rights are respected, everyone’s opportunity for participation in social and political affairs is guaranteed, and access to adequate housing is secured for all by law and in practice.
Currently 25 lawyers and 4 activists with other background work together so that everyone has the chance to have proper housing, no one is criminalized or discriminated against on the basis of their financial background, no one misses out on legal aid because they do not have money for a lawyer, and the state and municipalities adhere to their obligations to citizens and residents by respecting human rights and dignity.
The volunteers’ work is coordinated by three part-time managing directors, who are supported by three legal coordinators, a communication and a fundraising specialist.
Our Mission
The Team of the Streetlawyer Association
Our goal is to…
… achieve just and equitable laws and their implementation focusing on housing, social rights, regulations on housing by the state and municipalities, access to social allowances, and registration of addresses.
… achieve the actual legal equality of all, especially that of homeless people and people living in bad and insecure housing, stepping up against their discrimination, criminalization, and for more just regulations on misdemeanors, the pandemic situation, judicial enforcement, and their fair and lawful implementation.
… enhance legal awareness, legal empowerment and the ability of homeless people and people living in bad or insecure housing to represent their own interests. We create and disseminate information materials and videos making laws and their practice easy to understand, and hold capacity-building and training events.
Why is Streetlawyer Association needed?
➤ To provide easy access to free and effective legal aid to people living in poverty, especially to homeless people and people living in bad and insecure housing.
➤ To pressure state bodies and municipalities to ensure human treatment to all people by providing adequate housing opportunities and social support.
➤ To make sure the state does not criminalize homeless people, rather takes steps to eliminate homelessness.
➤ To alleviate housing debt and housing insecurities.
➤ To prevent and in some cases stop unjust and unlawful evictions.
➤ To inform and legally empower people regarding housing, social support, and the operation of municipalities.
➤ To ensure that people in housing poverty actively take part in the struggle for housing and social rights, like the non-lawyer activists of SLA without whom our public square legal aid would not be possible.
How do we work?
Free public square / remote legal aid
For 12 years since SLA’s founding, we have been providing free low-threshold legal aid every Friday for 2 hours on a public square in Budapest. In addition to legal aid, our volunteer lawyers write submissions and requests, and represent the client at court if needed.
Projects for systemic changes in law
The SLA is best known for its public legal aid service. However, another important pillar of the work is the projects through which we work for systemic change.
Strategic litigation
Our professional legal team takes on cases in national and international courts that can affect legislation, policy-making, or institutional practice and lead to systemic change.
Public interest data requests and analysis
We request public interest data in the fields of housing and social rights to compel the state and municipalities to operate in a transparent and accountable manner and to support our own advocacy and legal work.
Review and comment on laws/regulations and on their practical implementation
We review and comment on drafts or new laws, decrees, or amendments, and make recommendations for systemic change to enforce more just, equitable housing and social regulations and practice, one that respects human dignity.
Raise legal awareness and empower
We prepare and disseminate easy-to-understand guides and videos on laws and their adequate implementation. We also hold capacity-building sessions, workshops, and training activities to various target groups from inhabitants of child-care facilities to law firms.
Our Successes
➤ Upon the submissions of the Metropolitan Court of Budapest and SLA to the Constitutional Court, the Government has submitted a proposal to amend the Enforcement Act, which may lead to a significant improvement in the debtor's legal remedies.
➤ Following the complaint by the SLA, the Media Council of the Hungarian Media Authority fined the government-affiliated tabloid Metropol. Later, the administrative court upheld the fine and it ruled that the article on homeless people published last August violated the Media Act since it portrayed homeless people as violent deviants.
➤ We have won a lawsuit against the Government Office of Budapest in a case of a mother who had previously been refused an application for an infant care allowance. The Metropolitan Court of Budapest, relying directly on the Fundamental Law ruled that there was no justification for the refusal.
➤ Following our request, the Hungarian Chamber of Bailiffs has corrected the incorrect legal information on its website.
➤ We prevented a hospital worker from being put out on the street by the municipality of District VII and we won an eviction case of a client suffering from mental illness.
➤ The Municipality of Budapest partially accepted SLA’s recommendations when amending its decree on public housing. Among others they introduced procedural guarantees favoring tenants, a discriminative provision was removed from the decree, and they made it possible for domestic abuse to be taken into account when deciding about rental housing distributed based on equity.
➤ We got the Constitutional Court in 2020 to state that children cannot be criminalized for prostitution, and to oblige the Government to amend the law on misdemeanors, including by securing the adequate possibility to appeal in certain cases.
➤ In one of our clients’ cases the Curia of Hungary (Supreme Court) ruled that the police cannot apply handcuffs if the person investigated is cooperating with the police.
➤ After three years of litigation the SLA won a case in which the Curia of Hungary obliged the Government Office of Budapest to pay a grievance award, because it had unlawfully excluded our client from the social support for working-age people, and to apologize in writing for violating her personal rights. When the Government Office failed to act on time, we lodged a judicial enforcement procedure against it.
➤ We represented several clients at court, helping them to get back the unlawfully withdrawn or not granted social support. In one case, we convinced the court to order a new public administrative procedure, in another, to find that the government office unlawfully rejected our client’s request for equity. We are fighting for our clients’ access to social support in many other cases.
➤ We managed to prevent, or in some cases to stop evictions by intervening in judicial enforcement procedures.
➤ Our submission convinced the police to withdraw a HUF 25,000 fine imposed on a homeless man for violating the pandemic-related curfew, as they acknowledged that the man had in fact nowhere to go during that time.
➤ We represented The City is for All activist group in their freedom of information cases, when the court obliged the National Police to give access to the data on death caused by hypothermia, and the municipality of the 5th district of Budapest to release data on public housing.