face three years in prison for alleged anti-Semitic remarks and instigation against a community, BosNewsLife learned Friday, June 7.
The Central Prosecutor’s Investigation Office proposed to lay charges over a controversial article written by Pastor Lorant Hegedus Jr., who was the main editor of MIEP’s newspaper in Budapest, said Zoltan Borbely, the spokesman of the Budapest Prosecutors Office in an interview with the Hungarian News Agency MTI.
In the controversial article Hegedus Jr. suggested that "since every Palestinian cannot be smoked out with Fascist methods, shaming even the Nazis, from the banks of the river Jordan, they are now coming again here, to the banks of the river Danube."
NATIONAL SENTIMENTS
In a clear reference to the Jewish people, the pastor reportedly wrote that they sometimes come "as internationalists, sometimes by showing off their national sentiments, sometimes as cosmopolitans, to kick [again] the Hungarians."
He added that "Hungarians, based on the heritage and legal continuity of 1,000 years" should "listen to the only life-offering message of the 1,000th Christian Hungarian year: Exclude them, if you do not do so, they will [exclude] you!"
His article was widely interpreted as incitement of hatred towards the Jewish population in Hungary, which was a close ally of Nazi Germany during World War Two when an estimated 600,000 Hungarian Jews died in the Holocaust. Whether the pastor will go to prison will depend on legal proceedings in what is expected to be
a difficult trial.
TEST CASE
The far-right Pannon radio said in April that a private individual had already lost a test case against Hegedus Jr., who is the son of a well known Hungarian Bishop. This unidentified individual reportedly objected to his article with the phrase "the wanderers from Galicia", a part of Poland from where many Jews fled to Hungary because of pogroms in the first decades of the 20th century.
Hegedus Jr. won that case, which could be appealed, after the court upheld the defense’s arguments that the complainant had no right to sue because the Civil Code stipulated that an individual had the legal rights of a person, and not a community.
The Budapest District Court also rejected a case against MIEP chairman Istvan Csurka, Lorant Hegedus Jr. and MIEP deputy chairman Laszlo Bognar, launched by 42 private individuals who had accused them of having violated their rights to human dignity by anti-Semitic statements and writings.
PERSONAL RIGHTS
The court explained its ruling by saying that a person could only sue in court for the violation of his own personal rights but he could not do so on behalf of a community, Hungarian radio reported last month.
However the latest proceedings started by prosecutors against Hegedus Jr. seem to be different and analysts point out that they began only after his immunity was suspended by parliament in January.
Hungary’s Reformed Church has been in disarray over the issue, and it recently criticized pastors who were active for MIEP. The party lost all its Parliamentary seats during the local elections in April, after initial international concern about nationalism and far right developments in this former Communist nation.
