By Richard Field for the Budapest Times
A nation is judged by the way it treats its weakest members –so wrote Aristotle in the third century BC. One wonders what he would make of last Thursday’s conviction and sentencing of five Roma and one Hungarian to a total of 29 years in prison for what prosecutors said was a racially motivated attack on a Hungarian student. Four of the six suspects had been held in detention since their arrest on 23 October 2009 even though their victim did not sustain any permanent or life-threatening injuries. If their conviction is upheld on appeal, most of them will serve out the balance of their sentences in prisons usually reserved for murderers and repeat violent offenders. To the extent several of the defendants regularly intimidated, assaulted and robbed students at a local college they deserve to be punished. What is disconcerting about the verdict is that this is the second time in less than half a year Roma have been convicted of committing hate crimes against Hungarians when Roma tend to be the victims of such crime.
Hungary’s record on civil rights widely criticised
According to an Amnesty International report last year Violent Attacks Against Roma in Hungary, Hungarian prosecutors rarely charge non-Roma assailants with an “assault on another person for being part… of a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group” under Article 174/B of the Hungarian Criminal Code. Figures provided by the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union (HCLU) indicate that between 2005 and 2009 there were 24 hate crime cases involving the indictment of 38 defendants, all of whom were found guilty of committing a crime against a member of a community. Because Hungarian police are prohibited from identifying the ethnicity of defendants in legal proceedings it is difficult to determine to what extent hate crime laws have been turned on their head and are being used against the very ethnic minorities they are intended to protect.
The Amnesty report is one of several documenting human-rights abuses in Hungary. Even the tersely worded 2009 Human Rights Report on Hungary issued by the United States Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor devotes ten single-spaced pages to alleged human-rights violations ranging from the unlawful detention and forced repatriation of asylum seekers, to the use of excessive force by the police and limitations on people’s rights of peaceful assembly.
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