BUDAPEST: Hungary’s renowned Central Euro­pe­­an University announced on Monday it had been “for­ced” to move its most prestigious study programmes to Vienna after a long and bitter legal battle with Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government.

“CEU has been forced out,” Michael Ignatieff, rector of the university founded by US-Hungarian billionaire George Soros, said in a statement.

Set up in 1991 and charte­red in the US state of New York, the CEU says it was the target of a law passed in April 2017 that placed tough requirements on foreign universities.

Despite taking steps to comply with the new rules, the university said the government still did not yield and it needed to take measures in order to recruit new students for the next academic year. “We can’t play this game any longer, we are moving to a country where there is rule of law, from now on we will admit our new students in Vienna,” Ignatieff later told reporters at a press conference.

In October the university set a deadline of December 1 for Orban’s government to come to an agreement to allow it to continue to operate its US-accredited courses but no solution was reached.

The CEU’s departure is widely seen as part of a broader campaign waged by Budapest in recent years against Soros, 88, whom Orban accuses of orchestrating migration flows.

“This is unprecedented. A US institution has been driven out of a country that is a Nato ally,” said Ignatieff.

A 22-year-old CEU student from Russia, who gave his name as Vladimir, said the university’s fate reminded him of how the Russian government had treated a similar institution in Saint Petersburg. “Even in Russia, the university was finally given a licence and it can operate now, but here it cannot — that says a lot about Hungary,” he said.

The CEU, however, plans to keep its Budapest campus and those students who have already enrolled there will be able to complete their studies.

Published in Dawn, December 4th, 2018