Supreme Court hands down acquittal in case of banned red star

Hungary’s Supreme Court on Tuesday acquitted a one-time vice president of the Workers’ Party on charges of using totalitarian symbols, overturning an earlier ruling of the Budapest Municipal Court.

Attila Vajnai was brought before the courts for wearing a red star on his jacket during a demonstration in February 2003.

The Budapest court ruled against Vajnai in 2005, noting that Hungarian law bans both symbols associated with the Nazis and the Communist dictatorship.

Vajnai asked the Supreme Court to review his case, citing s ruling by the European Court of Human Rights on July 8 last year which stated that Hungary’s ban of public displays of totalitarian symbols put unjustifiable limits on freedom of expression.

Vajnai, the one-time vice-president of the communist Workers’ Party, put a five-pointed red star on his lapel during a demonstration in Budapest in February 2003.

Under Hungarian law, distribution symbols of authoritarianism, such as the swastika, the SS-badge, the arrow-cross, the hammer and sickle and the five-pointed red star or using them in public are punishable by a fine.

The Strasbourg court ruled three years later that the Hungarian law had been badly formulated since it ignored other possible valid associations with the red star. For instance it is a symbol of the international workers’ movement and that of legitimate political parties operating in some member states.

“The act of wearing such a symbol can create discomfort for victims of the regime, but a feeling of discomfort, however understandable, cannot justify fixing limits on freedom of expression,” the Strasbourg court said.

The Supreme Court has now established that the previous ruling of the Hungarian court was incompatible with the Treaty of Rome’s clauses on human rights and has therefore quitted Vajnai.