Miklos Nemeth, Hungary’s last communist-era prime minister, will not be obliged to hand over copies of protocols of talks he had engaged in with the Soviet regime during Hungary’s peaceful transition to democracy in 1989, a Budapest court ruled on Tuesday.
Hungarian Historian Peter Kende had asked the court to instruct Nemeth to publish three documents containing crucial data on the period.
One of them is a protocol of Nemeth’s talks with Gorbachev on March 3, 1989, and another is the exchange of letters between Nemeth and Soviet Prime Minister Nikolai Rizkov in the same year. Both of these documents contain information about the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Hungary and on Soviet nuclear weapons stored on Hungary’s territory.
The documents are mentioned in a book of Andras Oplatka, a historian living in Switzerland, which deals with the 1989 events. Oplatka said he had accessed the documents from Nemeth’s private archives.
Nemeth’s lawyer said at the Tuesday court hearing that his client only held copies of the documents and that he had deposited the originals with the Prime Minister’s Office and the Foreign Ministry upon leaving his post.
Kende’s lawyer insisted that the originals should be in the National Archives of Hungary where they are available for scientific study.
Hungarian laws on public access to documents from this era are controversial. Historians are fighting an ardent battle for the disclosure of pre-1990 secret police files, some of which are kept under wraps by the national security authority until 2060.
