HUNGARY: Hungary allows victims of communist surveillance to name agents who spied on them

Record ID: 575965

  • Title: HUNGARY: Hungary allows victims of communist surveillance to name agents who spied on them
  • Date: 19th December 2013
  • Summary: BUDAPEST, HUNGARY (FILE - 2008) (ORIGINALLY 4:3) (REUTERS) VARIOUS OF ARCHIVIST PUSHING TROLLEY WITH FILES ALONG SHELVES ARCHIVIST ROLLING SHELVES OPEN SHELVES HANDLES ROLLING
  • Embargoed: 3rd January 2014 12:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Hungary
  • Country: Hungary
  • Topics: Crime,Politics
  • Reuters ID: LVA9XAN1U24XKFBVAWGGLJ8PJ98Z
  • Story Text: Hungary makes communist secret service files fully open for victims, allowing them to make public the names of agents who watched them.


    More than two decades after the end of communism, Hungary has taken new steps towards a broad opening of communist era secret files.
    A new law passed by parliament on Tuesday (December 17), will create a 'Committee of National Memory' that will allow victims of communist surveillance to find out and publish the names of the secret agents and informants who spied and reported on them.
    Deputy president of the Christian Democratic People's party (KDNP), Bence Retvari, called the new law the most important 'informational' compensation of the victims of communism.
    "No agent is safe, no secret service agents are safe, nobody from the former III/III department directorate is safe because anytime any of their former victims can reveal their names, can publish their identity," Retvari told Hungarian media after the vote in parliament.
    During the debate in parliament Retvari said that the law would allow the victim to be in charge of the process and not continue to be a victim.
    Deputy faction leader of the ruling Fidesz party, Gergely Gulyas, told Reuters earlier that they were seeking to address the issue of facing the country's communist past in a way that would clearly differentiate between the perpetrators and the victims and expose the way the system worked.
    "The public discourse calls 'agents' even those who were victims of the dictatorship and who for example were blackmailed with their relatives to sign a paper to become an agent or informant. But in reality they never reported on anyone or hurt anyone. And those who are also called agents are those who operated the engine of terror and who hurt personal rights in the most brutal way. Such a revelation only makes sense if it clarifies these categories and makes public both the operators and operations of the regime," Gulyas said.
    The Historical Archives of the Hungarian State Security hold most of the files of the former interior intelligence department of the secret service, which dealt with spying on fellow Hungarians.
    They have about 1 million citizens' names listed in dossiers, but because of a lack of missing files they will never be able to fully identify all, according to the archives.
    About 60% of the documents were destroyed during the regime change.
    A large part of the remaining files are still kept by the secret services and much of the files stored the archives have so far could not be fully accessed even by the victims concerned.
    Historians have had access to the files for decades, but those affected now hope that they can find out who violated their rights under the communist regime without the names of the informants covered up in the documents.
    Opposition parties criticized the new bill, arguing all the names could be revealed at the stroke of a pen, if the government wanted to.
    LMP joint president, Andras Schiffer, called for the immediate release of all the files and said that new bill was just a small step and not necessarily in the good direction because the new Committee of National Memory will be appointed by the ruling parties.
    "The files and documents of the (communist) state security should be laid out on the table as a whole. And regardless of whether somebody or somebody's relatives are concerned, everyone should have access to this information in a way that does not hurt the personal rights of those who were watched," Schiffer told ATV on Thursday (December 19) morning.
    Unlike other ex-communist countries such as Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Hungary has not revealed the names of secret police collaborators from the communist era.
    Attempts to pass a law that would open up all files have repeatedly failed over the past decades.
    At present, files kept in the Hungarian historical archives can only be opened on the basis of individual review by archive staff to people who fear they were spied upon, or to historians who have official backing for their research but they are bound by a web of limitations of access and publication.
    Historian Krisztian Ungvary, who has specialized in communist era secret service history, argues for the complete opening of all files with democratic controls.
    "It's possible that 1% or even just 0.01% of the files are the ones which could create such a great political scandal that could change the whole political map of the country. From this perspective the question of what percentage of the files can be researched reveals very little. What we need is a decision of principle: everything should be made open for research except for those that would really hurt present national security interests. And there should be real parliamentary control. It should not be up to former state security officers and agents to decide what can be opened and what not, but it should be done in a democratic way," said Ungvary.
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