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VIKTOR ZOLTÁN KAZAI
DIVING BACK INTO THE RESEARCH AND TEACHING CAREER
Constitutional and Legal Policy Institute (COLPI)
V. Z. K.: Following your position as state secretary, you became the director of the
COLPI. Yet you left this job quite soon, after a mere three and a half years. Does
this mean you couldn't really find your place in the world of academia at the time?
K. B.: To be honest, I wasn’t quite sure what I was taking on. The whole thing
began way back, when I was approached by members of COLPI, offering me a job.
They tried to sweeten the deal by claiming that I would be able to participate in
legislative reforms all over the world. To which I replied: I am already involved
in preparing legislative reforms. And not just in Hungary: I had many foreign
gigs, starting with the Russian criminal code to the Albanian code of criminal
procedure, since I was quite popular at the Council of Europe at the time.
Then, when I resigned from the Ministry, Andras Sajé and Istvan Rev
approached me yet again to ask whether I would switch to the COLPI. I was very
happy to get this offer, since I didn’t really want to work as an attorney full time.
I actually thought that the Department for Criminal Procedural Law of ELTE
University would be breaking their back to hire me but they didn’t offer me a full
time position. (This is how I later transferred to the Department of Criminal Law
as department head, in a full time position). So I decided to seriously consider the
COLPI offer and travel to New York to talk to George Soros and Ariyeh Neier. I had
to keep the whole trip a secret, for although I had effectively resigned, my mandate
as state secretary had not yet ended and I didn’t want to create the impression that
I was leaving my government position for the Soros payroll. I think Soros liked
me. With Neier, however, I had the feeling he was looking for a different type of
person, nota scholar, but a militant activist type to head the COLPI. Nevertheless,
I got the job.
I have to admit, I didn’t really like COLPI, because it wasn’t geared towards
scientific work. When I sat down with Soros at the Grand Hotel on Margaret
Island in Budapest to discuss my job, he said I should forget science for a few
years. On top of that, I had to travel a great deal again, to the point that I didn’t
even know in which country I was half the time. When it became apparent that
this position was not built for me, they appointed an executive director above
me, and I was made director of research in an institute where I was banned from
doing research. Obviously, I still felt out of place; for the first time (and thankfully
the last) I looked down on my boss. With every trip abroad I had the feeling
following the negotiations with government representatives that the reforms we
promoted would not be implemented. This much I knew by that time. And what
really bothered me was that the Institute spent so much money on projects where
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