Today's Slovakia still treats its citizens of Hungarian ethnicity as a defeated nation. In fact, it considers them collectively guilty! Ferenc Kalmár claims in his writing.
After the end of the Second World War, one of the most grossly anti-Hungarian regulations was the Beneš Decrees in Czechoslovakia. One of them is the Slovak National Council 104/1945. Decree No. on the confiscation and accelerated distribution of the agricultural property of Germans and Hungarians, as well as traitors and enemies of the Slovak nation.
After the proclamation of the decrees, the Czechoslovak authorities began to implement them, but here and there a mistake slipped into the machinery. One such error affected the Reformed communities around Rimaszombat (Gömör).
The law did not apply to church properties, but it was nevertheless applied in this region.
After the regime change, the relevant bishopric initiated several restitution lawsuits, which unfortunately are still ongoing. Restitution in Slovakia was closed in 2006. However, the aforementioned real estate confiscations did not fall under restitution laws. Because the 104/1945 no. decree came into force even before the establishment of the communist system.
In other words, it is an ethnicity-based and not a system-based regulation.
Another grain of sand in the machine resulted in the discovery at the beginning of the 21st century: there are still Hungarian people or their descendants who own real estate. That is, the 104/1945 no. decree was not implemented in some cases.
We don't know what the reason was. However, we know that in the past period there was a zealous office in Slovakia, namely the National Land Fund, which set out to correct the mistakes of the 1940s with political support.
Every time we raise the question to our Slovak partners, their answer is that these are "provisions of historical importance that have no current effect".
On the other hand, the Slovak Constitutional Court, upon request, issued a resolution stating that
the Beneš decrees are part of the Slovak legal system and as such can be applied by the courts, as they do.
According to the data in the National Land Fund's 2020 report, based on which the portal Ujszo.com publishes an article in its issue of February 4, 2022, according to which a total of 600 proposals have been submitted since 2019, in which, citing expropriation decisions and deportation lists, they demand the ownership of affected properties.
It is a huge asset, which automatically became the property of the Slovak National Land Fund.
These facts show that the Beneš decrees are far from historical in nature and do have a modern impact. There is a lot!
It would be expected that the European institutional system, which pays so much attention to European values, and the European political elite, would take a stand. However, he apparently does not deal with this.
Source, full article and featured image: Felvidek.ma / Ferenc Kalmár
(The author is co-chairman of the Hungarian-Slovak Intergovernmental Joint Committee on Minorities, former minority rapporteur of the Council of Europe.)
