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The government will continue to provide the necessary funds for the programmes, the Ministry of Culture and Innovation said.
The ministry told MTI that “the government has undertaken to protect Hungarian students and researchers against the discriminatory decision of Brussels, which lacks any legal basis”.
The European Commission’s decision on the “European Universities” initiative, announced at the beginning of July, does not concern student-teacher mobility but other educational cooperation between universities within the Erasmus framework, they stressed.
They added that, in line with its commitment, the Hungarian government will provide all universities with the resources to participate as associate members in the educational cooperation.
The deadline for signing agreements on mobility programmes is the end of November this year. It is also untrue that the Court of Justice of the European Union has rejected the requests of the University of Debrecen to suspend an EU decision banning the renewal of contracts, they wrote.
The court merely rejected the university’s request for interim measures, which does not affect the outcome of the case, but merely failed to give a preliminary ruling without examining the merits of the case, they added.
They pointed out that the government will continue to provide the necessary funding for programmes such as Erasmus, Horizon and COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology).
To this end, it has set up a HUF 5 billion research funding fund this year to cover direct EU research grants and will expand it in the future if necessary.
Erasmus+ mobility programmes are guaranteed until the end of June next year, and next year’s budget will also cover the continuation of these if necessary. This protects the interests of Hungarian researchers and students but also serves the original values of the founding of the European Union, the ministry said in a statement.
Source: MTI – dehir.hu |Photo credit: Facebook (debrecenvarosa)
