Comments concerningthe findings of the so-called Gönczöl Report |
Editor's Preface
After the eventful years of Hungary's peaceful democratic revolution, 1988-1994, the country and its capital city, Budapest, once again returned to the front pages of the world press in September and October 2006. Television channels broadcast scenes of an enraged mob attacking riot police, a blazing police truck, a Soviet made vintage T-34 tank driving into a police phalanx, and mounted police storming pedestrian demonstrators. Scenes of violence which this part of the world has never seen in peacetime and under democracy. The real extent of the turmoil on the streets was overrated by the international press, alarming a good many tourists who would visit Budapest for a while. The threat to the laws and the procedures of democracy, however, posed by the handling of protest demonstrations by government authorities and the police, was not truly recognized. Such misinterpretation was also encouraged by government communication, which magnified the significance of violent groups and suggested their links to the moderate political opposition - a link that has been never proved. The allegations of the government against peaceful demonstrators, the behaviour of the police, and the handling of the detained civilians by the authorities has been examined and described in detail in the Report of the Committee of Civil Jurists. Their findings describe a wide range of human rights offences on the part of the government - the use of tear gas and rubber bullets by the police against peaceful demonstrators, the causing of lifetime injuries and handicaps, humiliation and brutal treatment of detained persons, the denying of access to legal counsel and to rightful court proceedings of the first instance. The Report of the committee of Civil Jurists was published in English in February this year, and it can be read on the web at www.oktober23bizottsag.hu. Press evidence of police misdemeanor was scandalous enough to prompt the Government to initate a purportedly independent report of the events by legal and political experts. The Gönczöl Report, as it is called, published in February 2007, did its best to whitewash the Government, denying its responsibility, while admitting some instances of abuse and mistaken action on the part of the police. Mainly prompted by the Gönczöl Report, a different investigation was carried out by three former Judges of the Hungarian Constitutional Court, Mr. Géza Herczegh, Ms. Éva Tersztyánszky Vasadi and Mr. János Zlinszky. It is their summary, entitled Comments, that we are publishing now in English, following the book format Hungarian version which came out in June 2007. The first version of Comments was published in the press in February, less than three weeks after the Gönczöl Report. Based on government communication, on press reports, on testimonials of civilian victims of rights abuses as well as their own personal observation, the three Judges carefully analyze every step the police and the authorities took in the course of events in Budapest in September and October 2006. (It is a telling detail that the government's own internal examination has been qualified as a confidential document, and not open for the public for seventy years.) The criteria of the Judges' Comments is the Constitution and the rules of law and democracy. Contrary to what the Government and the Gönczöl Report said, the three Judges found the following offences against the law in the behavoiur of the authorities:
The Prime Minister, by admitting to continuously misleading the citizens during his previous tenure in 2004-2005, triggered off a political crisis, whose constitutional and political consequences he was not willing to face, The Government failed to accept its responsibility for police action throughout the examined period, Police commanders overruled the Constitution and the European Court's rulings in their orders and instructions to their corps, Police action was lacking in proportionality and professionalism, Police did not defend innocent civilians but attacked them, Members of the riot police did not wear personal identification badges, thereby eschewing individual responsibility and subsequent court action for their brutality, Courts of the first instance, in great haste, committed serious procedural mistakes and handed out unjustified sentences against civilian defendants.
Taken together, the above and several other constitutional offences suggest that the present government of Ferenc Gyurcsány poses a serious threat to the laws and institutions of Hungarian democracy. The Judges also state that the Hungarian police has not been transformed in the spirit of the democratic changes during the last seventeen years, and the spirit and rules of the European Union. In its internal culture, its style of command and its attitude to the citizen, it has preserved an alarming amount of the residues the communist heritage. It is perhaps appropriate that we close down the editorial work on these Comments on the eve of the first anniversary of the largest protest demonstration in Budapest, October 23, 2007, which is also the anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Gyula Kodolányi |
