Hungary’s government is expected to decide soon about the future of some top-secret tapes containing communist-era secret service files, national daily Nepszabadsag reported on Tuesday.
The exact content of the tapes is unknown, but a group of IT experts have been examining the integrity of the data for months and will soon help determine how much of their earlier work secret service officers could have eliminated. The data on the tapes is still thought to be more comprehensive than what is available in a paper-based form about the pre-1990 period.
A report on the tapes is due on December 15, the paper said.
The 18 tapes now under scrutiny fell under considerable controversy in the 1990s. Some believed the authenticity of the data was questionable, data was inaccessible or simply too costly to retrieve, the paper said. Some of these concerns have since been proven unwarranted.
The tapes were stuck together and had to be separated by a special method before the IT personnel could start examining them.
A committee of historians in charge of access to information about the pre-1990 communist secret services has fought for years to get access to the tapes. Janos Kenedi, a senior researcher and head of the committee, told the paper he believed the IT examination had been successful. Based on an agreement with the government, the Kenedi-committee will get access to the data on the tapes, as these legally fall under the same category as paper-based documentation. Other historians are also expected to ask for access to them, much in the same way as to other files currently classified until 2060.
In May this year, Kenedi won a case in a Strasbourg court against the Hungarian state for failure of granting public access to the documents.
