Earlier this week, on Tuesday the 19th, the Helsinki Commission of the U.S. Congress held a hearing on “The Trajectory of Democracy – Why Hungary Matters.” Over at Hungarian Globe, they have posted the full written statements as well as an interview with MEP József Szájer and a video of the hearing.
Have a look at the hearing and you’ll see that, as Szájer himself points out in the interview, the verdict was already decided before the hearing began. The Helsinki Commission invited three, apparently independent experts to testify, all of whom are well known for their critical perspectives. There was no attempt to create some balance on this panel. The only Hungarian – the only Hungarian testifying, and quite probably the only one of the panelists who speaks and understands Hungarian, at a hearing on Hungary – was Dr. Szájer, who spoke prior to the panel and was not given any opportunity to respond to the critical remarks. Senator Cardin – who, it should be noted, was the only member of the Commission to attend the hearing; none of the other eight senators or nine members of Congress attended – asked MEP Szájer several questions following his testimony, pressing and challenging. But the senator had no questions at all for the members of the panel. No challenges, no requests for clarification, nothing.
Logo of the U. S. Helsinki Commission. Source: CSCE.gov
And, as usual, there were some serious problems with the facts presented in the testimony. For example, Dr. Kim Lane Scheppele, claimed in her statement:
As a result, if a tax law passed this year infringes an individual’s constitutionally guaranteed property rights or if such a tax is applied selectively to particular minority groups, there is nothing that the Constitutional Court can do – in perpetuity. This opens up a space for the government to violate many personal rights without any constitutional oversight.
Aside from cynical, this claim is false. As she frequently does, Dr. Scheppele fails to note a rule that says that even tax laws can be reviewed by the Constitutional Court if they may violate some basic rights, and the first basic right in this list is human dignity. The discriminatory taxation example she uses – a tax applied selectively to a minority group?! – would be a textbook case of such a violation and, as such, the Constitutional Court has the power to overturn it.
Here’s another from her statement:
Or if the constitution says anyone may freely express her opinion but an amendment says that no one may defame the Hungarian nation (a provision that was also added to the constitution with the Fourth Amendment), there is nothing the Court can do.
This is yet another example of Dr. Scheppele’s selective use of detail. She commits exactly the same error of omission that, as I noted in a previous post, the Washington Post did in its editorial last week, quoting the same article and leaving out the same phrase. The complete article from the amendment is as follows:
“The right of freedom of speech may not be exercised with the aim of violating the dignity of the Hungarian nation or of any national, ethnic, racial or religious community” (emphasis added).
As I’ve asked a time or two before: Why did she leave that out? This clause and the one that follows, which gives any member of the said community the right to file a complaint in court, has far-reaching implications for prosecuting hate speech. This hate speech clause, which is based in part on a Council of Europe recommendation, was hailed as a historic step forward by Jewish organizations.
This raises Dr. Paul Shapiro’s testimony. Dr. Shapiro and I met not long ago in Budapest and had a friendly, rational exchange of views. Much of the first part of his testimony focused on history, and I can appreciate that as director of studies at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, he is concerned foremost with the memory of the hundreds of thousands of Hungarian victims of the Holocaust. So how could he miss this point about the hate speech clause in the amendment when it’s a major accomplishment in our ability to prosecute propagators of hate speech? MEP Szájer had just given a detailed explanation of this aspect of the Fifth Amendment in his statement. Could it be that Dr. Shapiro wasn’t listening to the only Hungarian witness?
Independent, expert analysis worthy of the name should be able to treat the subject with a certain sober detachment, should be able to search for and consider the facts and various arguments, weigh them with reason and present a conclusion based on the facts and reasoning. What we get from testimonies like that of Dr. Scheppele is far from that. Instead, they do what polemics always do. They draw a conclusion and then selectively line up facts, or something less than facts, to support it.
That happens sometimes in academia. But it becomes a problem when these polemics find an all too receptive audience in the Congress of the United States. Afterall, this is a committee composed of members of the US Congress and administration holding a hearing about Hungary, called “why Hungary matters,” a staunch ally of the US in the EU and NATO and one of NATO’s most committed contributors to the mission in Aghanistan. The US Congress – and Hungary – should merit a much higher standard of debate than what we heard on the Hill in Washington on Tuesday.
In the end, despite the fact that the match was 5 against 1, with the usual players and the usual setting, Hungary finally had an opportunity to demand that our voice should also be heard whenever it’s about Hungary. With his testimony on Tuesday, Szájer – and Tamás Fellegi at the Congressional hearing at the end of February – caused some healthy confusion and successfully poked some holes in the heretofore unchallenged Hungary-bashing narrative. Finally, we were part of the discussion, which is usually closed to a rather small cabal of critics. Nobody expected that the discourse about Hungary would change from one day to the next, so we’re pleased if these efforts have unsettled some opinions and upset some of the confused conclusions that are clearly out there.
