Biszku-Case Reloaded: International Law Obligations and Lacuna in Compliance with Respect to Communist Crimes

Abstract

The 1956 revolution in Hungary and the brutal response from the communist government remains one of the darkest episodes of the 20th Century Hungarian history. Among the acts included in the response on protestors were the indiscriminate firing of weapons on the demonstrating crowds – the so-called volley-fire cases – and the subsequent persecution of anti-communist ‘elements’, including torture, killing, illegal imprisonment and execution. To this day, no systematic attempts have been made to bring those responsible to justice. The failure to address communist crimes in Hungary continues to be a bleeding wound in Hungarian society after the fall of communism. In the 1990s the Parliament made several attempts to overcome the main legal impediment to prosecution of these crimes, that being the statute of limitations. Following the example of many countries facing the same question, the Hungarian Parliament endeavoured to incorporate the position that the statute of limitations should be treated as dormant until the regime that facilitated the crimes relinquished power. This approach recognizes that so long as the regime that perpetrated these crimes was divested of power, it was impossible to persecute such crimes and those responsible for perpetrating them. However, these legislative attempts were eventually all quashed by the Constitutional Court. While a basis for prosecution of these acts and of those perpetrating them was technically available under international law principles, apart from a few cases against lower-level perpetrators involved in the volley-fires, no systematic attempts were made to prosecute communist crimes based on international law. The question of how to deal with crimes committed in the communist regime was thus left unanswered for long years.