Magyar Hírlap welcomes the idea
of putting one time communist human rights offenders in the
dock. Fidesz is planning to incorporate in Hungarian criminal
law an international agreement according to which crimes
against humanity are not be subject to a statute of limitations.
The ruling party’s intention was announced last week
by MP Gergely Gulyás, who said Hungary had ratified
the 1968 U.N. Convention on the Non-Applicability of Statutory
Limitations to War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity, but
had failed to put it into Hungarian law. Earlier attempts
to put former senior officials on trial for ordering reprisals
after the 1956 revolution have been rejected by prosecutors
over the past two decades. According to Gulyás, several
dozen such files could now be reopened. In another move,
the governing parties also plan to deprive former communist
officials of their bonus old age pensions, but Magyar Hírlap’s
editorial concentrates only on the prospect of putting some
of them behind bars.
Deputy editor Gergely Huth feels that several dozen such
cases would be too few. If 92 year old Sándor Képíró could
be tried (for his role in a 1942 massacre in Vojvodina – See
Budapost, July 25), then “what prevents the judiciary
from putting commanders who gave to order to open fire on
peaceful crowds, or simple militiamen who pulled the trigger,
in the dock? Huth also suggests that former Socialist prime
minister Gyula Horn, now in a serious geriatric mental condition “could
be pulled out of the VIP ward too,” as a militiaman
in December 1965. In fact, he argues, the new law would finally
declare that Nazi and Communist crimes were equally hideous
and intolerable.
That fact has not been recognized so far in practice, Huth
suggests, because the regime change took place in 1990 as
a result of a compromise between the new parties and the
communist regime, and because four years later the most vocal
anti-Communist party, the Alliance of Free Democrats suddenly
formed a government coalition with the post-Communist Socialist
Party.
“Now we cannot afford further compromises,” Magyar
Hírlap’s commentator contends. “Several
thousand sinners should now pay for their deeds, rather than
just a few dozen.” budapost.eu
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