Hungary’s government this week will discuss a proposal to declassify communist-era secret police data, national daily Nepszabadsag reported on Tuesday.
The government is to decide the fate of 19 magnetic tapes on which secret police data from 1945 to 1990 — including names of informers and their targets — are stored.
An expert committee has recommended that the government provide funding to print out data from the secret reels, which provide the most complete record of the communist-era informant networks and their operations.
The data should update already existing national archives and to fill in missing information, it added.
Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany earlier said he would put the issue of declassifying the files to public debate, as well as consulting all five parliamentary parties before making a decision.
The committee has proposed posting a searchable database on the internet to grant open access to the documents.
They also propose expanding the range of public figures — people on whom it is mandatory to publish data of public interest — to include persons who were in public service before 1989/1990, Hungary’s transition to democracy.
Further, they said it should be requested of the national security service to justify the classification of any data which they withhold on national security grounds.
The committee also recommended scrapping the category of “top secret files” which are currently completely hidden from any inquiry. The committee has dealt with the issue of classified data for more than a decade and yet it has been denied access to some of the tapes because of the claim that no hardware existed on which to play them, the paper said.
The liberal Free Democrats, the party which proposed setting up the committee in the first place, have demanded that the government draw up the legislation by the end of the year.
