Parliament speaker cabinet chief trusts Romania will not legally block Nyirő reburial

The cabinet chief of President Laszlo Kover on Wednesday said that he maintained trust in Romania’s rule of law and that no legal obstacles would be put in the way of the reburial of Hungarian author Jozsef Nyiro.

Laszlo Veress spoke to MTI in response the Harghita county court’sWednesday ruling to annul the permit issued by the mayor’s office of Odorheiu Secuiesc (Szekelyudvarhely) for the controversial author’s reburial, citing formal deficiencies.

Veress noted that the Harghita court had accepted the petition submitted by the county prefect, who acknowledged earlier that the Odorheiu Secuiesc mayor’s office had made formal errors in the document rather than the organisers of the reburial.

Prefect Augusta-Cristina Urzica told reporters earlier that the permit issued on May 25 referred to a certificate issued in 2012, likely the cremation certificate instead of the death certificate issued in 1953, as required by Romanian law.

For this reason the reburial scheduled for May 27 in the writer’s native town in central Romania had not taken place, she said.

Jeno Szasz, the head of the Hungarian Civic Party (MPP) in Romania who initiated the reburial process, told MTI that he would urge the mayor of Odorheiu Secuiesc not to appeal the court decision but to issue an appropriate permit instead, “which will resolve the legal circumstances of the reburial”.

Szasz, who mayor of Odorheiu Secuiesc for three previous terms, insisted that their office had not made any errors when issuing similar documents over 22 years, and indicated his suspicion of a willful act towards preventing Nyiro’s reburial.

The ashes of the controversial author, who died in Madrid in 1953, had been brought to Hungary at the initiative of the Hungarian parliament, and laid in state at Budapest’s National Cemetery on May 23.

Nyiro, a one-time Catholic priest, the author of several popular novels on Transylvanian life as well as a lawmaker during the WWII fascist regime of Ferenc Szalasi, fled from Romania to Hungary and then on to Spain in the late 1940s after the Soviet invasion.