Minority rights resurface in Slovak-Hungarian relations after Magyar’s win

April 21 (Reuters) – The rights of Slovakia’s ethnic Hungarian minority have resurfaced as a thorn in bilateral issues after Hungarian election winner Peter Magyar protested Slovak legislation reinforcing post-World War Two retribution acts in his first phone call with Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico.

The dispute focuses on post-war decrees that applied collective guilt to take away property and citizenship from ethnic Germans and Hungarians living in what was then Czechoslovakia for alleged wartime wrongs.

The “Benes Decrees”, named after Czechoslovak President Edvard Benes, periodically return to cloud relations between EU neighbours Hungary and Slovakia. The Hungarian minority makes up about 9% of Slovakia’s population of 5.5 million.

Last year, Fico’s leftist-nationalist government tightened legislation around the decrees by making it a criminal offence to question them.

Hungary’s outgoing leader Viktor Orban, a close ally of Fico, let the issue lie but it was picked up by Magyar in the campaign before his landslide victory in the April 12 election.

Magyar stuck to his views on Tuesday in his first contact with Fico since the election.

“I told him clearly that we would be able to negotiate on any policy issue if we received a guarantee that Slovakia would repeal the legislation that threatens Hungarians living in Slovakia with imprisonment,” Magyar told Fico.

“And if it was stipulated that in the future the lands of our Hungarian compatriots in Slovakia would not be confiscated on the basis of the Benes Decrees based on collective guilt.” 

Fico said he told Magyar that Slovak-Hungarian relations had for years not been an issue of contention and that he wanted to focus on cooperation in energy.

The two countries continue to rely on Russian oil and gas and have formed a common front in a dispute with neighbouring Ukraine over a damaged Soviet-era pipeline carrying Russian oil.

“It clearly emerged from the discussion that Peter Magyar’s priority in Slovak-Hungarian relations are, and will be, the Benes Decrees, where we have fundamentally differing positions,” Fico said in a statement.

The Slovak leader, who endorsed Orban before Hungary’s election, said he would meet Magyar at an EU summit in Brussels prior to any bilateral visit.  

Magyar is expected to form a new Hungarian government by mid-May.

(Reporting by Jan Lopatka in PragueEditing by Gareth Jones)