Hedvig Malina
Encyclopedia
Hedvig Malina is an ethnic Hungarian student from Horné Mýto
, Slovakia
, who was physically assaulted allegedly in a hate crime
incident. Her case represents a highly controversial and debated issue of Hungarian
-Slovak relations.
after speaking Hungarian
in public. She claims her attackers wrote "SK (probably Slovakia) without parasites" , and "Hungarians to the other side of the Danube" spelled incorrectly (Maďari za Dunai, in Slovak Danube is written as Dunaj) on her clothes.
All Slovakian political parties condemned the incident, except the Slovak National Party, led by Ján Slota
, which remained silent.
Some two weeks after the incident, police closed the case, concluding that she made up the whole thing. Robert Kaliňák
, Slovakian deputy prime minister and minister of the interior, declared that none of Malina's claims could be confirmed. Her mobile network operator did not record any call on the day in question. She explained that she had told the police several times that she did not remember whether she had been speaking Hungarian on her phone or to someone in the street.
Malina claimed she had been robbed, and her identity papers were later sent to her address. Police claimed that a DNA analysis proved that the parcel had been posted by Malina herself. She gave the parcel to the police only two days after receiving it because of a national holiday. She had licked the stamp in an attempt to fix it back on the envelope after the police had asked her to turn over the entire package. It was later pointed out that at the time of posting the pack she was in hospital. In the hospital, Malina was treated for internal bleeding, which police authorities ascertain occurred before the claimed attack.
Graphology specialists assumed that the offensive writings on her clothes were most probably written by herself. However, the specialist did not ask Malina for a sample, but instead used an application for a passport from eight years before that may not have been written by her.
In a July 2007 interview with the Slovak Weekly .týžden, Malina said that Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico and Kaliňák initially believed what the police concluded, but later only kept repeating those statements due to outside pressure. She also said that she felt calm and had finished her fourth year at university with an excellent result.
Malina married her Slovak boyfriend Peter Žák in February 2008 after years of being together. They have a daughter and a son.
As of August 2011 the investigation is still not closed.
, then leader of the Party of the Hungarian Coalition
(SMK-MKP) questioned the results of the investigation, calling attention to the fact that medical examination initiated by the police did not take place until 10 days after the case, allowing time for bruises to disappear.
On September 13, 2006, Malina announced that she was maintaining her initial claims, saying she was willing to take a polygraph test, and that she and her lawyer, Gábor Gál were considering reporting the case to public prosecutors because the victim had been interrogated for six hours during which officers tried to persuade her to withdraw her claims.
Packa said the attitude of Malina and her lawyer was "the despising of the work of Slovak police", and Kaliňák claimed that Gál was trying to make it into a political issue.
Hungarian politician Viktor Polgár said that the incident was not an isolated case.
The following day, Gál stepped down due to pressure and the whole SMK-MKP for being involved in the case, and gave over the case to a Slovak attorney, Roman Kvasnica. Kvasnica laid a complaint with the Nitra prosecution, which was refused on October 18, 2006. In the meantime, state-owned Slovak television channel STV broadcasted a documentary directed by Eugen Korda, which claimed Kaliňák did not always tell the truth in connection with the case. The director was soon after dismissed from the television channel, reportedly for unprofessional behavior. The documentary reported mistakes made by the police and the Ministry of Interior but - according to a blog - was also biased and contained serious flaws.
Hungarian political parties Fidesz
and MSZP called Malina's case a show trial
. Zsolt Németh noted that the media was informed about the act of accusing before the lawyer of the victim, and the accusation had been announced before it actually took place. Robert Fico
called the comments "the coarse intervention of Budapest into Slovakian domestic matters".
, a Slovak political party.
statements from his mother and uncle, who said that Robert at the time was either at home sleeping or at a holiday place with his friends. Also in June, Hungarian Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány
said that nobody has the right to doubt the independence of justice in another country.
Examinations following the above statements suggested that Malina's handwritten testimony had not been copied accurately in typing, notably, an important sentence had been left out though this was not confirmed by Slovak police. The Chief Prosecutor's Office started an investigation to find out if it was necessary to look into the case again. As a result, Chief Public Prosecutor Dobroslav Trnka admitted that both the police and prosecution had made mistakes without specifying them.
in connection with the Malina case. Legal experts noted that the Minister of the Interior, who is not a member of any criminal justice organ, revealed facts from the case file to the public even before the plaintiff
had been informed her case had been shelved. The complaint was dropped in September when the police concluded there was no reason to prosecute them.
In September 2007, Chief Prosecutor Trnka decided to replace police investigators working on the case of Malina's alleged perjury and start the investigation again.
In October 2007, Tom Lantos
, Hungarian-born Democratic
member of the United States House of Representatives
, asked Prime Minister Fico to distance themselves from the Beneš decrees
, for a reasonable process in the Malina case, and to treat members of the Hungarian minority
as equals. Lantos also blamed Fico for creating the climate for anti-Hungarian sentiments by including "voluntarily in his coalition individuals with known ultra-nationalist, anti-Hungarian attitudes". Lantos said that Fico personally assured him that the Slovakian government had a "zero-tolerance" policy toward all kinds of discrimination. Lantos said he was considering introducing a congressional resolution condemning the ethnic attacks, saying, "The blame rests 100 percent with the Slovak side. This is not one of those instances where both sides are guilty."
In December 2007, (15 months after the beating) the Slovak police gave the video cassettes about the initial Malina hearing to Roman Kvasnica, her lawyer. It turned out the police had broken the law several times. They forgot to mention three police officers were also in the room throughout the hearing. The investigators stopped the recording at times. The hearing lasted for six hours, but the police recorded only five hours of it, and released only three hours of that recording. Despite the police's early claims not one, but two cameras were used for the recording. Malina is still accused of misleading the authorities for which she may be sentenced to five years in prison.
Malina then took her case to the European Court of Human Rights
, challenging what she calls the "inhuman and humiliating" conduct of the Slovak officials. She reportedly told the Népszabadság
that she was looking for "moral satisfaction."
Radio Slovakia International commented: "The victim has become the guilty party, and the question now is whether or not she will be prosecuted herself. She's been a pawn in a political game from the very beginning." ... "Thanks to the overtime put in by Béla Bugár and his ethnic-Hungarian SMK party, Malinova appears to be the victim of 'Slovak extremism', and not of a 'Hungarian game.' At this stage, we can only forgive Hedviga, but not forget those who were standing behind her the whole time".
Horné Mýto
Horné Mýto is a village and municipality in the Dunajská Streda District in the Trnava Region of south-west Slovakia.- Demography :At the 2001 Census the recorded population of the village was 969 while an end-2008 estimate by the Statistical Office had the villages's population as 981...
, Slovakia
Slovakia
The Slovak Republic is a landlocked state in Central Europe. It has a population of over five million and an area of about . Slovakia is bordered by the Czech Republic and Austria to the west, Poland to the north, Ukraine to the east and Hungary to the south...
, who was physically assaulted allegedly in a hate crime
Hate crime
In crime and law, hate crimes occur when a perpetrator targets a victim because of his or her perceived membership in a certain social group, usually defined by racial group, religion, sexual orientation, disability, class, ethnicity, nationality, age, gender, gender identity, social status or...
incident. Her case represents a highly controversial and debated issue of Hungarian
Hungary
Hungary , officially the Republic of Hungary , is a landlocked country in Central Europe. It is situated in the Carpathian Basin and is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine and Romania to the east, Serbia and Croatia to the south, Slovenia to the southwest and Austria to the west. The...
-Slovak relations.
Claim of violence
Malina claims she was severely beaten and robbed on August 25, 2006 in NitraNitra
Nitra is a city in western Slovakia, situated at the foot of Zobor Mountain in the valley of the river Nitra. With a population of about 83,572, it is the fifth largest city in Slovakia. Nitra is also one of the oldest cities in Slovakia and the country's earliest political and cultural center...
after speaking Hungarian
Hungarian language
Hungarian is a Uralic language, part of the Ugric group. With some 14 million speakers, it is one of the most widely spoken non-Indo-European languages in Europe....
in public. She claims her attackers wrote "SK (probably Slovakia) without parasites" , and "Hungarians to the other side of the Danube" spelled incorrectly (Maďari za Dunai, in Slovak Danube is written as Dunaj) on her clothes.
All Slovakian political parties condemned the incident, except the Slovak National Party, led by Ján Slota
Ján Slota
Ján Slota is the co-founder and President of the Slovak National Party, an extremist nationalist party. Slota as the leader of SNS entered into a coalition with Robert Fico's Smer in 2006...
, which remained silent.
Police investigation
Ján Packa, the head of Slovakian police set up a special squad, and started an investigation immediately.Some two weeks after the incident, police closed the case, concluding that she made up the whole thing. Robert Kaliňák
Robert Kalinák
Robert Kaliňák is a Slovak politician, formerly served as Interior Minister of Slovakia in the government of Prime Minister Robert Fico. He is currently a member of parliament. He studied Law at Univerzita Komenského in Bratislava....
, Slovakian deputy prime minister and minister of the interior, declared that none of Malina's claims could be confirmed. Her mobile network operator did not record any call on the day in question. She explained that she had told the police several times that she did not remember whether she had been speaking Hungarian on her phone or to someone in the street.
Malina claimed she had been robbed, and her identity papers were later sent to her address. Police claimed that a DNA analysis proved that the parcel had been posted by Malina herself. She gave the parcel to the police only two days after receiving it because of a national holiday. She had licked the stamp in an attempt to fix it back on the envelope after the police had asked her to turn over the entire package. It was later pointed out that at the time of posting the pack she was in hospital. In the hospital, Malina was treated for internal bleeding, which police authorities ascertain occurred before the claimed attack.
Graphology specialists assumed that the offensive writings on her clothes were most probably written by herself. However, the specialist did not ask Malina for a sample, but instead used an application for a passport from eight years before that may not have been written by her.
In a July 2007 interview with the Slovak Weekly .týžden, Malina said that Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico and Kaliňák initially believed what the police concluded, but later only kept repeating those statements due to outside pressure. She also said that she felt calm and had finished her fourth year at university with an excellent result.
Malina married her Slovak boyfriend Peter Žák in February 2008 after years of being together. They have a daughter and a son.
As of August 2011 the investigation is still not closed.
Controversy over the investigation
Béla BugárBéla Bugár
is a Slovak politician of Hungarian ethnicity. He is a member of the Slovak parliament since 1992, briefly serving as its acting Speaker in 2006. He is the leader of the political party Most-Híd....
, then leader of the Party of the Hungarian Coalition
Party of the Hungarian Coalition
The Party of the Hungarian Coalition, officially registered under the compound name Strana maďarskej koalície – Magyar Koalíció Pártja, is a political party in Slovakia, for the ethnic Hungarian minority...
(SMK-MKP) questioned the results of the investigation, calling attention to the fact that medical examination initiated by the police did not take place until 10 days after the case, allowing time for bruises to disappear.
On September 13, 2006, Malina announced that she was maintaining her initial claims, saying she was willing to take a polygraph test, and that she and her lawyer, Gábor Gál were considering reporting the case to public prosecutors because the victim had been interrogated for six hours during which officers tried to persuade her to withdraw her claims.
Packa said the attitude of Malina and her lawyer was "the despising of the work of Slovak police", and Kaliňák claimed that Gál was trying to make it into a political issue.
Hungarian politician Viktor Polgár said that the incident was not an isolated case.
The following day, Gál stepped down due to pressure and the whole SMK-MKP for being involved in the case, and gave over the case to a Slovak attorney, Roman Kvasnica. Kvasnica laid a complaint with the Nitra prosecution, which was refused on October 18, 2006. In the meantime, state-owned Slovak television channel STV broadcasted a documentary directed by Eugen Korda, which claimed Kaliňák did not always tell the truth in connection with the case. The director was soon after dismissed from the television channel, reportedly for unprofessional behavior. The documentary reported mistakes made by the police and the Ministry of Interior but - according to a blog - was also biased and contained serious flaws.
Kubla report
In November 2006 Juraj Kubla reported Malina to the authorities, accusing her of perjury. At the end of November the police initiated criminal prosecution against Malina, who, in turn, brought the case to the Constitutional Court. In May 2007, Kubla committed suicide. Kubla left behind a suicide note, but the police did not publish it.Hungarian political parties Fidesz
Fidesz – Hungarian Civic Union
The Fidesz – Hungarian Civic Union is a major conservative party in Hungary. At the 2010 election in Hungary, Fidesz-KDNP won a two-thirds majority of seats by gaining 52% of the votes, with Fidesz winning 227 seats and KDNP winning 36...
and MSZP called Malina's case a show trial
Show trial
The term show trial is a pejorative description of a type of highly public trial in which there is a strong connotation that the judicial authorities have already determined the guilt of the defendant. The actual trial has as its only goal to present the accusation and the verdict to the public as...
. Zsolt Németh noted that the media was informed about the act of accusing before the lawyer of the victim, and the accusation had been announced before it actually took place. Robert Fico
Robert Fico
Robert Fico served as the Prime Minister of Slovakia from July 4, 2006 to July 8, 2010.He is the leader of the left-wing party Direction – Social Democracy . The party won the parliamentary elections in 2006, receiving approximately 30 percent of the cast votes...
called the comments "the coarse intervention of Budapest into Slovakian domestic matters".
Korcek report
On May 26, 2007 it was revealed that another person besides Kubla reported Malina to the authorities. He was later identified as Peter Korček, a former secret agent and currently a member of the Christian Democratic MovementChristian Democratic Movement
The Christian Democratic Movement is a political party in Slovakia.It is represented in the parliament. It was also member of the government coalition, but it left that coalition on 7 February 2006 due to disputes over an international treaty between Slovakia and the Holy See dealing with the...
, a Slovak political party.
A possible witness
In June, Zdeno Kamenický from Nitra claimed he knew one of the attackers, Robert Benci from Nitra. Kamenický, due to uncertain reasons, was officially never interrogated by the police, who instead claimed that Benci had a "bulletproof alibi." This alibi later turned out to be two contradictingContradiction
In classical logic, a contradiction consists of a logical incompatibility between two or more propositions. It occurs when the propositions, taken together, yield two conclusions which form the logical, usually opposite inversions of each other...
statements from his mother and uncle, who said that Robert at the time was either at home sleeping or at a holiday place with his friends. Also in June, Hungarian Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány
Ferenc Gyurcsány
Ferenc Gyurcsány is a Hungarian politician. He was the sixth Prime Minister of Hungary from 2004 to 2009.He was nominated to take that position on 25 August 2004 by the Hungarian Socialist Party , after Péter Medgyessy resigned due to a conflict with the Socialist Party's coalition partner...
said that nobody has the right to doubt the independence of justice in another country.
A change in view
The next month Packa, the head of the police, contrary to his claims he made one year before, said that "Malina might have been beaten." He explained, "we never claimed she was not beaten. We claimed it did not happen the way she states." It was also revealed that medical certificates made right after the incident but disregarded by the police did prove Malina's recounting. Dušan Čaplovič, deputy prime minister also accepted that "she may have been beaten, but not because she is Hungarian".Examinations following the above statements suggested that Malina's handwritten testimony had not been copied accurately in typing, notably, an important sentence had been left out though this was not confirmed by Slovak police. The Chief Prosecutor's Office started an investigation to find out if it was necessary to look into the case again. As a result, Chief Public Prosecutor Dobroslav Trnka admitted that both the police and prosecution had made mistakes without specifying them.
Abuse of power claims
In August 2007, a former high-ranking police officer, Jozef Šátek, filed a complaint against Fico, Kaliňák and Packa, claiming that they had abused their powerAbuse of Power
Abuse of Power is a novel written by radio talk show host Michael Savage.- Plot :Jack Hatfield is a hardened former war correspondent who rose to national prominence for his insightful, provocative commentary...
in connection with the Malina case. Legal experts noted that the Minister of the Interior, who is not a member of any criminal justice organ, revealed facts from the case file to the public even before the plaintiff
Plaintiff
A plaintiff , also known as a claimant or complainant, is the term used in some jurisdictions for the party who initiates a lawsuit before a court...
had been informed her case had been shelved. The complaint was dropped in September when the police concluded there was no reason to prosecute them.
In September 2007, Chief Prosecutor Trnka decided to replace police investigators working on the case of Malina's alleged perjury and start the investigation again.
In October 2007, Tom Lantos
Tom Lantos
Thomas Peter "Tom" Lantos was a Democratic member of the United States House of Representatives from 1981 until his death, representing the northern two-thirds of San Mateo County and a portion of southwest San Francisco...
, Hungarian-born Democratic
Democratic Party (United States)
The Democratic Party is one of two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Republican Party. The party's socially liberal and progressive platform is largely considered center-left in the U.S. political spectrum. The party has the lengthiest record of continuous...
member of the United States House of Representatives
United States House of Representatives
The United States House of Representatives is one of the two Houses of the United States Congress, the bicameral legislature which also includes the Senate.The composition and powers of the House are established in Article One of the Constitution...
, asked Prime Minister Fico to distance themselves from the Beneš decrees
Beneš decrees
Decrees of the President of the Republic , more commonly known as the Beneš decrees, were a series of laws that were drafted by the Czechoslovak Government-in-Exile in the absence of the Czechoslovak parliament during the German occupation of Czechoslovakia in World War II and issued by President...
, for a reasonable process in the Malina case, and to treat members of the Hungarian minority
Hungarians in Slovakia
Hungarians in Slovakia are the largest ethnic minority of the country, numbering 520,528 people or 9.7% of population . They are concentrated mostly in the southern part of the country, near the border with Hungary...
as equals. Lantos also blamed Fico for creating the climate for anti-Hungarian sentiments by including "voluntarily in his coalition individuals with known ultra-nationalist, anti-Hungarian attitudes". Lantos said that Fico personally assured him that the Slovakian government had a "zero-tolerance" policy toward all kinds of discrimination. Lantos said he was considering introducing a congressional resolution condemning the ethnic attacks, saying, "The blame rests 100 percent with the Slovak side. This is not one of those instances where both sides are guilty."
In December 2007, (15 months after the beating) the Slovak police gave the video cassettes about the initial Malina hearing to Roman Kvasnica, her lawyer. It turned out the police had broken the law several times. They forgot to mention three police officers were also in the room throughout the hearing. The investigators stopped the recording at times. The hearing lasted for six hours, but the police recorded only five hours of it, and released only three hours of that recording. Despite the police's early claims not one, but two cameras were used for the recording. Malina is still accused of misleading the authorities for which she may be sentenced to five years in prison.
Malina then took her case to the European Court of Human Rights
European Court of Human Rights
The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg is a supra-national court established by the European Convention on Human Rights and hears complaints that a contracting state has violated the human rights enshrined in the Convention and its protocols. Complaints can be brought by individuals or...
, challenging what she calls the "inhuman and humiliating" conduct of the Slovak officials. She reportedly told the Népszabadság
Népszabadság
Népszabadság is a major left-leaning Hungarian newspaper, founded in 1956 as successor of "Szabad Nép" , the central organ of the dissolved Hungarian Working People's Party...
that she was looking for "moral satisfaction."
Conspiracy theories
Malina got into the centre of several conspiracy theories, which relate the case to the Slovak authorities or nationalists.Radio Slovakia International commented: "The victim has become the guilty party, and the question now is whether or not she will be prosecuted herself. She's been a pawn in a political game from the very beginning." ... "Thanks to the overtime put in by Béla Bugár and his ethnic-Hungarian SMK party, Malinova appears to be the victim of 'Slovak extremism', and not of a 'Hungarian game.' At this stage, we can only forgive Hedviga, but not forget those who were standing behind her the whole time".