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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 + 36 +
