Motivation to Stay Out of Hungarian Jails and the Judge’s Logic

Last Thursday’s Budapest Transit Company (BKV) hearing in Kecskemét, Hungary heard the testimony from the former BKV press officer Éva Horváth, who is the sixth defendant in the trial of 15 BKV associates.  The testimony from Horváth was a shocking recount of her experience in pretrial jail.

Horváth, who is accused of being an “instigator” in the misappropriation of BKV funds and causing financial damages to the public company which totaled 77,757,817 HUF (slightly more than $353,000.00 at the time of writing), claimed that she spent three months in Hungarian prison.  This statement sparks interest because there are no details of Horváth’s pretrial treatment listed in the indictment.

Thursday’s testimony from the former PR specialist was a shocking recount of enduring bigoted guards.  She claimed that because she is Jewish, she was subjected to weekly inspections of her cell when the inspectors would “pour garbage in the middle of her cell that included personal belongings and told [her]: ‘clean it up, Jew!’”  According to Horváth, guards also told her that if her rabbi continued to visit her they would not be able to help her from “falling out of her bed and hurting herself.”  The defendant also implied that the guards may have tried to drug her with the sedative Rivotril.  And if that wasn’t enough, she told of times when the temperature reached 130°F (59°C) in her 6×6 meter cell which housed four women.

Note to self: avoid Hungarian prison.

Horváth’s lawyer, Péter Bárándy, former minister of justice, proposed to Judge Ibolya Hadnagy the transfer of the case from the Kecskemét Tribunal to the city of Budapest.    Bárándy’s supported his proposal by referencing a December decision that some of the temporary provisions of the Hungarian constitution, dubbed the Foundational Law, were actually unconstitutional.  One of those rejected temporary provisions allowed for the case to be transferred from the courts in Budapest to Kecskemét in June 2012.

Judge Hadnagy rejected the proposal, however.  According to her, the prosecution’s appeal for a rejection of the proposal was more logical.  The case was not transferred because of the law, but in accordance with it – a law that was recently found to be unconstitutional.

Source: http://thehagyocase.wordpress.com/