Andras L. Pap
András L. Pap is Professor at the Law Enforcement Faculty of the Ludovika University of Public Service in Budapest, Hungary. He is also Research Professor and Head of the Department for Constitutional and Administrative Law at the (formerly Hungarian Academy of Sciences) Centre for Social Sciences Institute for Legal Studies, as well as Professor of Law at the Institute of Business Economics at Eötvös University (ELTE)in Budapest, Hungary. He is also Adjunct (Recurrent Visiting) Professor in the Nationalism Studies Program at the Central European University in Vienna, Austria.
He was visiting scholar at NYU Law School’s Global Law Program, and Marie-Curie Fellow at the Slovak Academy of Sciences.
His research interest include comparative constitutional law, human rights, law enforcement, in particular hate crimes, discrimination and the conceptualization of race and ethnicity.
In 2018 he founded the International Association of Constitutional Law Research Group on identity, race and ethnicity in constitutional law.
Select recent publications
Neglect, marginalization and abuse: hate crime legislation and practice in the labyrinth of identity politics, minority protection and penal populism, Nationalities Papers The Journal of Nationalism and Ethnicity, Volume 49 Issue 3. (2020)
Harassment: A Silver Bullet to Tackle Institutional Discrimination, But No Panacea for all Forms of Dignity and Equality Harms, (2019), Intersections. East European Journal of Society and Politics 2(5):
Democratic Decline in Hungary, Routledge, 2018.
Sessions
The paper has two parts. The first begins with mapping out four distinct ways in how the COVID19 virus may effect certain groups incommensurately and lead to systemic and institutional discrimination. This is followed by an overview of how Roma throughout Europe have been targeted by racializing and securitizing populist political rhetoric (often coming from government or local governments and identifying ethno-culturally rooted reasons for higher infection rates and disobeying curfew and social distancing measures) and law enforcement action during first wave of the pandemic in Albania, Belgium, Bulgaria, Hungary, Italy, Moldova, North Macedonia, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Turkey and Ukraine. Using the example of the Hungarian framework for policing multicultural communities, the paper investigates whether such legislation could in fact be used as a basis for such targeted action. Hungary is not among the countries where such anti-Roma political rhetoric would have been reported from, and its legislation on policing multiethnic communities is used, because it arguably fits within the model of adopting European and international standards and rhetoric. The paper introduces the concept of benevolent penal populism (which carries the potential to be turned into a malevolent one) to explain this threat and phenomenon.