Miklós Haraszti is a Hungarian writer, journalist, human rights advocate and university professor. He served the maximum two terms as an OSCE representative on Freedom of the Media from 2004 to 2010 and is currently an adjunct professor at the Columbia Law School’s School of International and Public Affairs in New York.
Haraszti studied philosophy and literature at Budapest University. In 1976, he co-founded the Hungarian democratic opposition movement and in 1980 he became editor of the samizdat periodical Beszélő. In 1989, Haraszti participated in the round table negotiations on a transition to free elections.As a member of Hungary’s parliament in the 1990s, he authored the country’s first laws on press freedom and, from 2004 to 2010, he was the OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media. Currently, he works for The United Nations as a special rapporteur on human rights in Belarus and as an adjunct professor at the Columbia Law School, where he teaches courses on global press freedom issues. Haraszti’s books include A Worker in a Worker’s State (1975) (a book for which he was sentenced to a suspended prison term on charges of “subversive agitation”) and The Velvet Prison: Artists Under State Socialism (1983) (which reveals the censorship and self-censorship mechanisms at play in Communist Hungary), both of which have been translated into several languages.
Information valid as of spring 2016.