The sections fostering Hungarian-Slovak friendship in the two national groups of the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) held their first joint meeting after a two-year interval in the border town of Komarom, N Hungary, on Thursday.

"Ties got frozen" in the autumn of 2007 when the Slovak Parliament re-affirmed that the post-WWII Benes decrees are still in force, Gyorgy Rubovszky, head of the Hungarian-Slovak friendship section, said. The Benes decrees based on collective guilt deprived many ethnic German and Hungarian inhabitants of then Czechoslovakia of their homes, property and citizenship.

Miroslav Ciz, head of the Slovak IPU group, said that the issue of the decrees had not been discussed in Komarom.

His Hungarian counterpart Gabor Hars said the two sides had surveyed bilateral relations and the sources of tension, such as the recent amendment to Slovakia's state language law and the Forum of Hungarian Representatives of the Carpathian Basin.

The Slovak delegation invited the Hungarian MPs for another round of talks in Bratislava before the spring of 2010. Rubovszky accepted the invitation so as to ease tension through dialogue.