At 6 PM on June 5th, 2018, we will host the thirty-sixth debate of the VERITAS Debate Nights series at the Budapest Business School. The title of the debate is Politics of Clemency: 1945–2016. Tibor Zinner, VERITAS Head of Archives, and Réka Kiss-Földvary, Chairperson of the Committee of National Remembrance, will familiarize the audience with the topic, while Endre Marinovich, VERITAS Deputy Director, will lead the discussion.
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“The truncheon is a primitive weapon compared to a gun, but the best weapon is the judiciary.” – Nikolai Krylenko, Soviet prosecutor (later executed)
Following the end of WWII, in the lands east of the Elbe River, which fell under Soviet authority, the legal system was used as a means of fully implementing Moscow’s short and long term goals and to strike fear into the hearts of the millions of people now living under Soviet occupation.
Having filled the prison and labor camps to capacity, from time to time a “cleansing of the clink” would occur. In Hungary up to 1989, prisoners, who in most cases had been wrongfully sentenced, were freed through legislation, statutory regulation, directives of the Presidium of the People's Republic of Hungary or, on occasion, via individual clemency. In most cases, however, the various undertaken amnesty measures did not spring from charity or forgiveness, but rather from a need for more prisoner space. One datum that perfectly encompasses the circumstances: In February 1956, if there had been enough room in the prisons to house everyone convicted, then 54 thousand people would have been imprisoned simultaneously. Capacity in the prisons, however, was enough for half.
It was no accident then that at the time of the System Changeover, two initial and then three ensuing nullification laws were necessary to remedy the earlier human rights violations. In conclusion we owe the 1,234 executed and the much greater number of innocent prisoners sentenced by the Hungarian judicial system from February 1945 to summer 1988 an impartial accounting of what happened.
