Claim:
The perpetrators of the communist regime were not punished because the Alliance of Free Democrats (SZDSZ), which had made a pact with the forces of the old regime, prevented this.
Rebuttal:
Originally, none of the parties involved in the transition to democracy pushed for accountability, but later several retroactive justice bills were introduced. However, according to the Constitutional Court, these were contrary to the principle of the rule of law. The SZDSZ also opposed these laws, but was unable to prevent them from being passed. (Incidentally, it abstained from voting on the most well-known reconciliation bill, unlike the Fidesz and the Socialist Party /MSZP/, which actively voted against it.)
In detail:
The issue of delayed justice is a difficult moral, legal, and political dilemma, in which legal possibilities and society’s sense of justice, or at least the sense of justice of many people, proved to be incompatible. In addition to the demand for justice, there was also a demand from part of society that those who operated and benefited from the previous system should be held accountable for their actions in the new system. Admittedly, this only gained prominence from 1991 onwards. In 1989-1990, in the midst of the negotiated transition, few people demanded accountability: only the Hungarian October Party led by György Krassó raised the issue – the party that ultimately did not accept the electoral rules and thus could not enter parliament in 1990. The Történeti Igazságtétel Bizottság (Historical Truth Commission) also envisaged only moral accountability and that those who had been compromised should not be allowed to play a role in public life. In 1989, even the Forum of Hungarian Democrats (MDF) rejected “revenge,” which may have played a role in the majority actually seeing them as the “calm force” their slogan claimed them to be – that is, in their coming to power after the first election. The successor of the state party, the Hungarian Socialist Party (MSZP), was also a participant in the “negotiated regime change,” so it seemed natural that those in the second and third tiers of the state party would continue to be involved in politics in 1990. It is true that the elderly Kádár guard (e.g., György Aczél, Béla Biszku) and the hardliners of 1989—e.g., Károly Grósz, János Berecz, György Fejti—did not push for this.
Nevertheless, the demand for justice arose from the pro-government side in the summer of 1991, but Prime Minister József Antall did not embrace the so-called Justitia Plan. His statement that “well, why didn’t you make a revolution” also suggested that the vocal supporters of the proposal had been singing a different tune before 1990. The 1991 initiators adopted a view of history that clearly contrasted the guilty and the innocent, the few hundred perpetrators and the pure, oppressed nation as victims. Another approach to coming to terms with the past – and thus to building democracy – would have emphasized that, to some extent, the majority had also adopted a modus vivendi with the dictatorships of the century and were burdened by varying degrees of “collaboration” and compromise with the authorities.
The bill submitted by MDF politicians Zsolt Zétényi and Péter Takács as an individual motion targeted a narrow range of crimes committed between December 21, 1944, and May 2, 1990, namely murder and treason. It argued that these crimes could not be time-barred before 1990 because they were not prosecuted. Parliament passed the “Zétényi-Takács law” with the votes of Fidesz and MSZP and the abstention of SZDSZ. However, President Árpád Göncz exercised his authority and referred the legislation to the Constitutional Court, which, led by László Sólyom, found the provision on “statute of limitations” to be unconstitutional and concluded that the crime of treason between 1944 and 1990 could not be legally defined from 1991 onwards.
The two positions were debated in front of the entire public on November 26, 1991. In the debate between Imre Kónya (MDF) and Iván Pető (SZDSZ), the latter also argued that the statute of limitations could not be suspended and even considered that if such a law were passed, the those involved would be able to successfully defend themselves in court. The audience did not appreciate Pető’s remark that before 1990, only a very small group—mostly associated with the SZDSZ—was actively involved in the resistance, while the majority of society made smaller or larger compromises with those in power.
Subsequently, several attempts were made to pass a law with similar content, but Zsolt Zétényi’s second bill was also rejected by the Constitutional Court, which at that point already indicated that certain forms of accountability were possible under international law. In 1993, a law was finally passed that would have criminalized crimes committed during the 1956 revolution and its suppression. Several lawsuits were filed on the basis of this law, with the so-called “firing squad trials” receiving the most publicity. The defendants in the eight trials before 2003 were the perpetrators of the shootings in November and December 1956, but even the most severe sentence was only a five-year suspended prison term. This is because no attempt was made to bring the main perpetrators, the political leaders who ordered the firing or carried out the reprisals, to justice before the 2012 indictment against Béla Biszku. In the Biszku trial, which was initiated on the basis of a law passed in 2011 (known as the “Lex Biszku”), the first-instance verdict had to be overturned and a new trial initiated, but in the end, no final verdict was reached due to the death of the defendant.
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