The signatories - György Dalos, Miklós Haraszti, György Konrád and László Rajk - of the letter, The decline of democracy – the rise of dictatorship: An appeal quoted from below, are some the leading figures of the underground before 1989 - in other words the people who took the risks of imprisonment and exclusion.
Excerpts:
The present government has snatched the democratic political tools from the hands of those who could use these tools to ameliorate their predicament. While chanting empty patriotic slogans, the government behaves in a most unpatriotic way by reducing its citizens to inactivity and impotence...
...Viktor Orbán's government is intent on destroying the democratic rule of law, removing checks and balances, and pursuing a systematic policy of closing all autonomous institutions, including those of civil society, with the potential to criticise its omnipotence...
...With the removal of the checks and balances, the whole Hungarian state has become subservient to the government, or rather to the prime minister...While local councils have lost the better part of their clout, semi-autonomous institutions such as the Court of Auditors, the Hungarian Press Agency, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the National Cultural Fund might well be regarded today as semi-governmental agencies. Arbitration committees, including the now defunct National Conciliation Council, have been disbanded...
...Fidesz now has the exclusive right to pass any bill into law and make decisions about any issue concerning parliamentary protocol, thus rendering the existence of opposition parties a mere formality. Bills are rushed through legislation with no debate worthy of mention...
...* While retirement age has been raised across the board, a significant proportion of leading judges has been forced into retirement. The judiciary has thus become existentially dependent.
* The Chief Prosecutor, who has the exclusive right to decide which case may be forwarded to the Court of Justice and which court should hear it, is a politician of the ruling party.
* In the future, suspects and the accused may be deprived of the opportunity to consult their solicitors.
This new system marks the end of independent jurisdiction in Hungary...
The appeal goes on to deal with executive power, jurisdiction, the media, and election law. I know this looks like dry stuff and nothing to do with you but it's vital and will impinge on Europe as a whole. I have said it before, but it seems very like a return to the 1930s.
2 comments:
George - I wish I could 'tweet' this! What's happening in Hungary is a warning that too many people are unaware of - do you think you could use either the Guardian or the Independent to highlight it? The Hungarian government is getting away with a fascist agenda and neither paper has so much as mentioned it.
I wasn't alive in the 1930's - but one of my clearest childhood memories is of the Hungarian Uprising in 1956 that sent you and your family into exile here. That time it was an external regime - now it's a group of your own people - but the results will be equally horrific.
There is a letter in today's Guardian signed by many people, including myself, about the New Theatre in Budapest, Jenni. It's symptomatic of the fact that people realise that something is going on, and the western press is picking up on it.
It isn't even this or that individual fact but the combination of them, accumulating so fast, that is the big issue. Maybe that needs highlighting.
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