Dalai Lama street among new street names near planned Chinese University announced by Budapest Mayor 

DHARAMSALA, 3 June: To send a strong message to the Hungarian government and China,  the Mayor of Budapest has made an announcement to rename streets in the capital near a planned campus of a Chinese university to call out Beijing’s human rights abuses.

“The signs bear the names of the persons and people who have been persecuted by the Chinese Communist Party,” HKFP quoted Budapest’s liberal mayor Gergely Karácsony as saying in its report.

“This is… a stand for solidarity and freedom, which Hungary has been committed to for 30 years.”

A street in the Bulgarian capital will be named after exiled Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, a Nobel peace laureate and a global peace icon whom China labeled a ‘separatist,’  while another street will be named after persecuted Chinese Catholic priest Bishop Xie Shiguang Road.

Additionally, there will also be two other streets named  Free Hong Kong Road and Uyghur Martyrs’ Road respectively to call out China for eroding rights and freedoms of the Hongkongers and the genocide of the Uyghur Muslims and their human rights abuses by Beijing.

The new names of the four roads in the city were inaugurated by the Mayor on Wednesday to protest the Hungarian government’s plans to build a new campus for Shanghai’s elite Fudan University in its capital, media reports said.

“China and Hungary are worlds apart when it comes to human rights and solidarity,” the Mayor has said.

The renaming procedure now awaits the Budapest Municipal Council’s approval, the Hungary Today reported and added that it would be finalized within days citing the Mayor.

The Hungary government has signed a €1.3 billion loan from China in order to build the new campus for the controversial “Fudan Hungary University,” local investigative news site Direkt36 has confirmed in April.

It is set to be built by a state-owned Chinese construction company.