Hundreds gathered outside the Slovak Embassy in Budapest on Saturday evening to protest against the recent amendment of Slovakia’s Criminal Code, which makes it punishable by up to six months of imprisonment to publicly criticise the so-called Beneš Decrees that established the ‘collective guilt’ of ethnic Hungarian and German citizens of Czechoslovakia after WWII.
The demonstration, organized by a group of conservative university students from Hungary and Slovakia, featured speeches by the organizers, who highlighted that the discriminatory decrees are still in force in Slovakia, and continue to impact the Hungarian minority. The speakers also stressed that penalising criticism of the decrees is a serious violation of free speech. The crowd listened in silence to the speeches, with no chanting reported. Politicians across the political spectrum were spotted among the demonstrators.
Although the organizers had called on participants to refrain from displaying party symbols, some turned up with flags of the radical right-wing opposition party Mi Hazánk and of the pro-Brussels, anti-Orbán Tisza Party. Tisza leader Péter Magyar, although some sources say he had been explicitly disinvited, also took part in the protest, and held a press conference after the demonstration ended, bashing the Fidesz government for its “silence” on the matter.
