Budapest Takes Concerted Action to Help Homeless in Underpasses

Budapest, November 20 (MTI) – Social workers, public area inspectors and the police will take week-long action day and night in Budapest’s most frequented underpasses to help homeless people in need, the Budapest municipality’s law-enforcement directorate said today.

The aim of the action is to ensure that no homeless person in the capital is left without care, the directorate said in a statement. Everyone should receive help to ensure that they spend the coldest days and nights in a warm place, it added.

The aim is to prevent hypothermia and to take action against “deviant persons to ensure that frequented underpasses are kept clean and in order…”

At the beginning of November, Hungary’s supreme court, the Kuria, ruled that a section of the 2013 municipal decree restricting the use of public spaces by the homeless is in breach of the law.