can finally open all files of its communist-era secret service agents, many of whom persecuted dissidents and Christians.
The governing Socialist-Liberal coalition, which backed the law that makes this possible, asked President Ferenc Madl to forward the text to the Court for review amid legal concerns over making the names of former secret service collaborators public.
Critics claim the spy legislation, passed late Monday, May 30, violates the protection of personal data enshrined in the constitution while others criticize the law because it doesn’t encourage prosecution of former agents.
CRIMES
"If you could see that your leaders or your journalists or your politicians committed such inhuman crimes without any punishment, I think that would undermine the moral of the democracy. So than it is very difficult to explain what is the difference between a democracy and dictatorship," the influential Hungarian historian Maria Schmidt told BosNewsLife in a recent interview.
Unlike Eastern Germany and several other Warsaw Pact countries, new European Union member Hungary did not reveal the names of secret police collaborators, and very little information on the spying services accumulated on the country’s 10 million Hungarians.
It led to a scandal in 2002 when then-prime minister Peter Medgyessy was forced, after a leak, to admit he had served as a counter-espionage officer under the communist regime. Medgyessy told a BosNewsLife reporter that "at that time this served the interests of the country" and that he does "not think that it was a mistake."
SCANDALS
Earlier this year, leaks of files containing the names of communist-era secret service collaborators caused an outcry in Hungary. Even Hungarian Church leaders have been pressed to publicly admit their alleged co-operation with the former Communist regime.
In recent years Catholic Priest Gyorgy Bulanyi, who was persecuted under Communism, urged Hungarian church leaders to confess their alleged links with the Communist authorities and the dreaded secret service. "We could cleanse all of Hungarian public life (and) the Hungarian Catholic clergy, if a confession were made to the effect that we danced to the tune of the party-state," he told Hungarian television.
The new law foresees making available dossiers of the communist security apparatus containing the names and reports of agents and collaborators with the espionage, counter-espionage and the domestic intelligence services. However experts say several restrictions are still in place blocking the release of such information.
In addition it is unclear how many documents have been destroyed shortly after the collapse of Communism. (With: Stefan J. Bos and BosNewsLife Research)
