Brussels, 25/02/2002 (Agence Europe) - The Czech Republic and Slovakia have strongly rejected the comments last week by the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban to the European Parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee, when in response to a question by CDU MEP Jürgen Schröder, he said that the Benes Decrees had to be scrapped since they were "incompatible with European law", and that they had been bad laws 50 years ago and were still bad laws. The Czech deputy foreign minister Rudolf Jindark demanded explanations from the Hungarian government, saying he was "surprised" and irritated that Hungary was turning the Benes Decrees into a bilateral issue. The Slovak Prime Minister Mikulas Dzurinda said that there was no point in going over disagreements from the past. Mr Dzurinda and his Czech counterpart Milos Zeman have both cancelled their participation in the Visegrad Summit (the 4 Visegrad countries are Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic and Slovakia) that was due to take place in Budapest this week to co-ordinate negotiating positions for the final round of accession negotiations with the EU in the tricky areas of regional policy, agriculture and the budget. The meeting has been put off until some time in the future.
Several representatives of Czech political parties (both social democrats from CSSD and the democratic citizens' party ODS which is currently in the opposition) have criticised Mr Orban's comments as "absolutely unacceptable". The President of the Czech parliament (considered as a front runner for prime minister in the future) Vaclav Klaus even went as far as calling for a clause in the future treaty of the Czech Republic's accession to the EU confirming the Benes Decrees. The Decrees were passed immediately after the Second World War confirming the deportation of millions of people of German and Hungarian origin from the Czech Republic, along with the confiscation of their goods. Despite pressure from politicians in Austria, Bavaria and, now, Hungary, the Czech and Slovak governments have always refused to abolish the Decrees.
The EU's position on the Benes Decrees is clear - the Decrees are not part of the accession negotiations. After a meeting of the Czech Foreign Minister Jan Kavan last Friday with the Enlargement Commissioner Günter Verheugen, the latter again repeated this position saying that the Decrees were not connected with the accession negotiations and he could not see any connection in the future.
The CSU MEP Bernd Posselt, Vice-President of the joint EP/Czech Parliament committee, called President Klaus' demand "deliberate provocation" of the European Parliament which has on three occasions called for the Decrees to be abolished as violating human rights and international law and having given rise to the deportation of three and a half million Germans and Sudetens. Mr Posselt is also President of the Sudeten Germans' association. He wondered how it would be possible to suddenly proclaim that racist laws are part of EU legislation and called on Chancellor Schröder to break his deafening silence on this subject and demand for the Decrees to be scrapped before the Czech Republic joins the EU, as have the Bavarian Minister/President Stoiber, the Austrian Chancellor, Schüssel, and the Hungarian Prime Minister, Orban.