Local and regional leaders gathered to pay tribute to János Esterházy in Stúrovo (Slovakia). Continue reading
“Stop Beneš!” was the title of a press conference held by the Hungarian Alliance (Magyar Szövetség – MSZ) on Tuesday. The reason for this was that eight decades after the end of World War II, the Slovak Land Fund is expropriating land that had not been confiscated at the time, mostly without the knowledge of the owners or their heirs, and of course, without any compensation.
The legal basis for the confiscations was and remains the decrees issued by former Czechoslovak President Eduard Beneš in the 1940s. Party chairman László Gubík and land lawyer Viktor Bugár also took part in the press conference at the party headquarters in Bratislava (Pozsony).
The MSZ chairman emphasized that although the Slovak government repeatedly refers to the Beneš decrees as historical documents that are no longer valid, the reality shows that they are still being used today as a basis for the deprivation of property rights, especially agricultural land.
The state then invokes a “correction” and claims that these lands should have been confiscated earlier in favor of the state,
but that this did not happen due to an administrative error, and that the Slovak Land Fund (SZFA), which now acts on behalf of the state, is merely correcting these cases.
The party now hopes that President Peter Pellegrini’s newly appointed advisor for the Hungarian minority, Krisztián Forró, will raise the issue in the presidential palace, as promised in advance. Even as a candidate for the presidency, Pellegrini had already said that this aspect of the Beneš decrees must be addressed.
Gubík emphasized that the aim was not to abolish all 143 decrees issued by Beneš, but only the dozen or so documents on the collective guilt of Hungarians and Germans, and did not even rule out the possibility of initiating a test case to prove the illegality of the land fund’s practices.
Via Ma7.sk; Featured photo: Fortepan / Rózsa László