Supported by: EEA Civil Society Fund Slovakia. 

Project span: September 2026 – August 2027.  

Project team: Zora Bútorová, Oľga Gyárfášová, Martin Bútorá, Miroslav Kollár, Grigorij Mesežnikov, Ján Bartoš. 

 
Objective: The aim of the project is, based on research, to find out how the public interprets human rights, how it perceives the struggle to preserve the human rights system, to whom it attributes the role of their guardians or destroyers, how it perceives the struggle over the essence of the application of human rights in Slovakia after the 2023 parliamentary elections. The intention is also to develop recommendations on what human rights NGOs and civic initiatives should do in this situation. 

Activities: The project will use three sources of information as part of the research. 

The first will be the analytical summary of an interactive discussion (focus group) with the prominent representatives of NGOs dealing with the country’s human rights issues. 

The second will be a secondary analysis of quantitative data from domestic and international representative public opinion surveys. 

The third source will be qualitative research in the form of moderated focus groups with respondents representing selected segments of the public. The group discussions, according to a pre-prepared scenario, will reveal how and on what basis they interpret human rights; who in their eyes are the guardians, who promote and respect human rights and who, on the contrary, are their destroyers, to what extent they consider Slovakia to be a society based on respect for human rights. 

Audio-recordings will be analyzed and processed into a separate chapter of the analytical study. The study should serve as a basis for a series of discussions with representatives of human rights organizations, which will be held in 4 locations, each for actors from two neighboring regions. 

Outputs: Analytical report, implementation manual, workshops, press releases.