Miklos Haraszti is a writer, journalist, human rights advocate and university professor. His books, including 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) (revealing the censorship and self-censorship mechanisms at play in Communist Hungary), have been widely published throughout the world. One of the founders of Hungary’s democracy and free press movement in the 1970s, in 1989, Haraszti participated in the country’s Round Table Talks, which determined its 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. Miklos Haraszti is also an adjunct professor at Columbia Law School‘s School of International and Public Affairs in New York, where he teaches courses on global press freedom issues.
Information valid as of spring 2016.