Following Prof. Arthur Helton's recommendation following the participation in a CEU course on asylum law and three workshop meetings at UNHCR Budapest and CEU in the first half of 1999, I completed a two-month internship with the Center for Documentation and Research of the UNHCR between September and December 1999.  Literature, including internal documents, was collected at the UNHCR, IOM and NGO netowrks (ICVA Geneva and ECRE London).  Several interviews with leading officials of intergovernmental organizations were recorded on the topic of the offices' policies for Central and Eastern Europe.  A paper criticizing the diminishing role of UNHCR in Hungarian asylum policy was then presented at a conference at the School for Slavonic Studies of the University of London in November 1999, and appeared hence in the journal Slovo (see here).  Two conferences, of ELSA in Gottingen (Oct. 1999) and of European Youth Parliament in Budapest (Feb. 2000), gave me an opportunity to work the Hungarian case into a larger European picture, through a legal presentation and a defense of a resolution on the impact of Schengen on the Central European candidate countries.

IPF portion of the project relied on the knowledge of the Hungarian asylum and migration policymaking community which I gained before leaving for Geneva.  Messieurs Berglund and Pasquale (UNHCR), Dr. Koszeg and Ms. Pardavi (Hungarian Helsinki Committee), Ms. Toth (Institute of Political Science at the Hungarian Academy of Science) were briefed on the informal aspects fo the creation of the policy network in Hungary.  I confirmed the findings of Lino Molteni (CEU Political Science Department) that a close-knit web of personal relations had been crucial for cooperation between asylum NGOs, UNHCR and ORMA and the Border Guards in Hungary.

In this context, most of the work in the first part of the IPF project consisted of six trips (instead of planned two) to Warsaw, where interviews were conducted with both the UNHCR and NGO networks between January and June 2000.  Their results showed equally strong reliance on personal networks, but interestingly the constellation of organizations working in the field differed much thanks to a much more international focus of the work.  As opposed to Hungary, where much of the incentive for work with migratns came from the national imperative to assist ethnic Hungarians or improve the country's record vis-a-vis the European Union on the plight of minorities, Polish NGOs were motivated by the themes of democratic solidarity and building of transnational civil society to build capacity of Belarussian and Ukrainian NGOs.