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Emese Kinga Latkóczy-Osváths’ grandparents were displaced members of a family belonging to the nobility originating from Slovakia and having several ties to the Smallholders Party. The other branch of the family participated in the 1956 revolution and suffered persecution afterward. Emese Latkóczy was born in Toronto in 1961. Like other members of the CHRR, she grew up within the large and lively Hungarian community, whose popular activities at the time included the Hungarian weekend school and Hungarian scouting groups. The family moved to New York in 1973, where her parents acquired a travel agency. She met László Hámos, one of the founders of CHRR, in the framework of the Hungarian scouting organization. She became a professional actress very early and was admitted to New York Film Academy at the faculty of acting. She graduated as a film director. She spent her compulsory high school volunteer period in 1977 –1978 at CHRR, thus supporting the organization from a very early period. She worked in the film industry, with which she became disillusioned at an early stage, while at the same time growing increasingly committed to working for the human rights of Hungarian minorities in East Central Europe. Later, she became chief executive of the HHRF and then head of the Budapest office. She is currently director of the HHRF.

Jiří Lederer was born on July 15, 1922 in Kvasiny near Rychnov nad Kněžnou. In Rychnov he later studied at grammar school. During the war, he was completely engaged to work in Wroclaw, to where he had fled and was hiding in his home region by the end of the war. After the war he studied philosophy and politics at the Political and Social College and at the Faculty of Arts of the Charles University in Prague. From 1948 to 1949 he studied Polish Literature and Sociology at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow.

After the war he published in the Social Democratic Letters, was an activist in the radical left-wing of the socially democratic youth, and in 1948 participated in the merger of the CSSD (Czechoslovak Socialist Democratic Party) with the Communist Party, which he later left. In 1948 he became the editor of the World in Paintings. For his disagreement with the practice of the 1950s, expressed at the conference of the Czechoslovak Union of Journalists, he was expelled from the union and could not publish or perform any work on culture. From 1951 to1954 he had to work in Ostrava's mines of ČKD.

Later, he was given amnesty and became the editor of the World of Soviets, and in 1956, Evening Prague, from where he was fired in 1958 for a positive review of the “Coward's” novel of Josef Škvorecký, which caused a great disturbance at the time. For a year he was unemployed before he was taken to the Technical News as an editor in 1959. Between 1962 and 1967, he was head of the Research Department of the Czechoslovak Radio, then the editor of the Weekly Literary Sheets (or Sheets) and the Reporter. Lederer was one of the most prominent publicists of the Prague Spring of 1968. In the 1970s, Lederer was deeply involved with the Czechoslovak dissent and was one of the first signatories of Charter 77. During the “Normalization Period” he was imprisoned several times (1970, 1972-1973 and 1977-1980), the first time for writing as a pretext for his attitude about the events of 1968 in Poland, the second time for the publication of interviews in Reporter with the writers who were not allowed to publish and for sending their works abroad. In 1980, he emigrated to the Federal Republic of Germany because of political pressure from the StB Asanace campaign. He continued his journalistic work in West Germany until he died at the age of 61 on 12 October 12 1983 in Birnbach, Bavaria.

He published several journalistic essays and books of essays (České Rozhovory, Cologne 1979; Když se řekne Voskovec – Když se řekne Werich, 1982, Mé Polsko, 1982) by samizdat and abroad while in exile; posthumously his book Jan Palach: A Report on the Life, Action and Death of the Czech Student (Prague 1990) was published.

Elzbieta Ledererová se narodila 15. července 1922 v polském historickém městečku Dolním Kazimierzi. Vystudovala filologii. Počátkem šedesátých let se v Polsku seznámila s výraznou osobností české žurnalistiky Jiřím Ledererem. V roce 1967 si ho vzala a žila v Praze. Psala do několika prestižních polských novin a překládala. Také spolupracovala s polským kulturním a informačním centrem. Po boku svého manžela se i ona aktivně účastnila společenského života a dění, které vyvrcholilo „pražským jarem”. Po invazi spojeneckých vojsk do Československa byla stejně jako její manžel vystavena perzekuci. V sedmdesátých letech se Jiří Lederer výrazně angažoval v československé opozici. Za tuto svou činnost byl několikrát vězněn, tak se i jeho žena stala součástí českého disentu. Elzbieta Ledererová podepsala, tak jako její manžel, Chartu 77. V roce 1978 patřila Ledererová mezi sedmnáct zakládajících členů Výboru na obranu nespravedlivě stíhaných (VONS). Byla jedinou členkou, která neměla československé státní občanství. Po propuštění Jiřího Lederera z vězení byla rodina zařazena Státní bezpečností do akce s krycím názvem Asanace. Pod nátlakem a hrozbou, že Elzbiete Ledererové jako polské občance nebude prodloužen pobyt v Československu, rodina emigrovala do Německa. Jiří Lederer se aktivně zapojil do činnosti exilu, ale již v roce 1983 zemřel. Po roce 1989 se paní Ledererová nevrátila do Polska, ale do Československa. Elzbieta Ledererová dostala v roce 2014 Cenu Václava Bendy, kterou uděluje Ústav pro studium totalitních režimů. Zemřela 27. května 2017 a je pochována jako její manžel v bavorském Bad Birnbachu.

Hardijs Lediņš (1955-2004) was an iconic personality in the Latvian avant-garde of the 1970s and 1980s. While still at school, he created several hand-written samizdat magazines, together with his classmate Juris Boiko (1954-2002), influenced by Dadaism and the absurd. These publications attracted the attention of the KGB, and almost all the magazines were confiscated after it searched Lediņš' home. Nevertheless, he was able to enter the Riga Polytechnical Institute to study architecture in 1973. His friend Juris, whose parents were victims of political repression, was not so lucky. While student Lediņš started to organize experimental disco-lectures at the RPI Student Club. The first part would be a thematic lecture about architecture or contemporary music, but the second part consisted of listening to music and dancing. The discos were extremely popular, and tickets sold out in 15 minutes. Lediņš lectured on popular music, rock, and contemporary ‘serious’ music of the New Viennese School, Paul Hindemith, Charles Ives, John Cage, etc. The disco-lectures ended in 1977, when, after the Second Festival of Contemporary Music, the organization of which Lediņš also took part in, the director and the artistic director of the Student Club were dismissed. For some time, Lediņš continued the discos in Jūrmala and provincial towns. He also organized his home recording studio Seque, where he, Boiko, and the architect Imants Žodžiks recorded their own experimental music, inspired by art rock and the avant-garde. In 1981, together with the visual artist Leonards Laganovskis and some other friends, he started a new project, the Kosmoss discotheque, where mainly New Wave music was played, but it also became a place where Latvian alternative music was performed. The group ‘Dzeltenie pastnieki’ (The Yellow Postmen) played their first hits there, based on lyrics by Lediņš and Boiko. A new element was introduced: visual effects and multimedia experience. In 1983, Kosmoss was closed down by the authorities, due to its ‘ideologically and morally harmful character’. As an architect, Lediņš was interested mainly in the philosophy of architecture in its postmodernist expansion (the ideas of Robert Venturi and Charles Jencks), the living environment, and the perception of living and urban spaces. Architectural ideas were integrated into his art projects: actions, performances and videos made by the NSRD (Workshop for the Restoration of Unfelt Feelings), which was first established in 1982 as an experimental music group, when Lediņš and Boiko were joined by the musician Inguna Černova. But later they gave this title to all the activities of their collective, which also included actions, performances, videos and multimedia art. Photographs from some actions were shown at exhibitions of work by young architects, and also at the exhibition ‘Vide, daba, cilvēks’ (Environment, Nature, Man) in 1984, the first exhibition where conceptual art was publicly shown. However, most of his activities were of an underground nature, and this was not only because the avant-garde art practized by the NSRD was not officially accepted, it was also a conceptual choice. For example, Walks to Bolderāja were considered by Lediņš as a private meditative practice. In the mid-1980s, Lediņš and Boiko created the independent artistic programme ‘Approximate Art’. With perestroika, the NSRD was able to popularize its art openly, the number of publications about the group increased significantly, and the NSRD participated in exhibitions. Lediņš and the NSRD received international recognition thanks to the exhibition ‘Riga-Latvian Avant-Garde’ in West Berlin, Kiel and Bremen in 1988 and 1989. The exhibition was a great success: it was the culmination of the NSRD’s activities, but also its end. From 1989, Juris Boiko and Hardijs Lediņš worked individually. Lediņš created the Approximate Art Agency with the aim of realizing a broad range of practical activities. However, its integration into international art proved to be more difficult than expected, and for several years Lediņš lived through a creative crisis. In the 1990s he started to experiment with electronic music. One of his last big projects was staging the opera ‘Rolstein on the Beach’ (an allusion to the opera ‘Einstein on the Beach’ by Philip Glass and Robert Wilson) with Kaspars Rolšteins in 1997.

Gabriella Lengyel (1948-) an activist of the Hungarian democratic opposition, sociologist, educator.

She was born in Budapest, his father was a radio mechanic had been running his own little shop, until it was ’nationalized’ by the Communist state. As a child she was a devoted member of the her school’s choir, and an extra for the National Theatre. In 1967 she started her studies at the Hungarian Actors Academy, but two years later she changed for studying history at Loránd Eötvös University, Budapest.

Through some friends she got in connection with the empirical research team of sociologist István Kemény and took part actively in the nationwide Roma survey from 1971, by visiting Gipsy families in the Trans-Danubian region. Inspirated by Kemény a year later she also started to study sociology at the university, as it was reintroduced legally in the curriculum of social sciences, and in the meantime she kept on being busy with her field researches. She received her MA degree in History in 1978 and in Sociology in 1981.

Gabriella remained a freelance sociologist up untill 1990, at the beginning to preserve her personal independence, and later because she failed to apply for state jobs, as a reknown activist of the opposition. During the 1980s she could not travel abroad either, as her claim for a passport was repeatedly refused by the police. In late 1979 she was one of the eight founding-members of SZETA, and the regular monthly meetings of activists for several years were held at her home in Miksa Déri street, in a workers’ district of Budapest. Apart from her sociological surveys and voluntary job done for SZETA she also took part in several activities of the dissident movement. She gave birth to her first child in 1984, and went on ’leave’ as an activist for a few years, but as the system was challenged by more and more radical changes, she herself reactivated. In 1987 she became a founding member, among others, of ’Asylum Committe’ a civilian organisation supported refugees fled from Ceausescu’s Romania, and was also an active organiser of the first independent Hungarian trade union, that of TDDSZ, ’Scientific Workers Democratic Union’ well before the political system changed.

Following 1990 she assisted her fiends became the member of Parieament Ottília Solt, and Gábor Havas to designe a new democratic social policy in Hungary. From 1993 she became one of the first educators of the newly established Social Worker Training School of John Wesley Theological College. After 1999 she returned to her field works as a freelance sociologist again, and conducted training courses of research methodology.