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Hungary Conscientious Objection
According to the National Defense Act, those persons
who
refused military service during peacetime could receive up
to
five years' imprisonment. Permission was sometimes given,
however, to Jehovah's Witnesses, Seventh-Day Adventists,
or
Nazarenes to serve as noncombatants in military
construction
units. Government opposition to Catholic conscientious
objectors
increased after October 1986, when the country's Catholic
bishops
declared that Catholics could neither refuse nor condemn
obligatory military service, although they did urge the
state to
allow some sort of alternative service. This proclamation
was
followed by reports of dozens of conscientious objectors'
being
arrested and sentenced to thirty to thirty-six months'
imprisonment by the Budapest Military Tribunal. These
so-called
"expedited" proceedings were characterized by trials
lasting only
ten to fifteen minutes. One man so imprisoned, Karoly
Kiszely,
wrote a letter to the Conference on Security and
Cooperation in
Europe enumerating the ways in which conscientious
objectors were
harassed: they were physically abused, and their
punishments were
imposed without court hearings, without regard for
judicial
processes, and without legal counsel. Those convicted were
allowed contact with only two family members, and they
were
permitted to send or receive only one "heavily censored"
letter
per month and to receive only one authorized visit by a
relative
each month. Furthermore, they were crowded together in
prison
with common criminals.
The government showed signs of softening its position
in late
1987, when it reduced the term of military service for
future
clerics from eighteen to twelve months. And in early 1989,
an
amendment to the National Defense Act permitting
conscientious
objection was introduced into the National Assembly.
Conscientious objection was to be allowed beginning in the
second
half of 1989. On March 1, 1989, the government announced
that
seventy conscientious objectors serving time in prison had
been
released and that their criminal record would be dropped,
pending
approval of a new National Defense Act. Noncombatant
service was
twenty-four months in the army and another twelve months
of
nonarmed reserve service. Civilian service was initially
proposed
for thirty-six months at locations to be determined by the
government, with labor paid for in wages. In June 1989,
the
National Assembly voted to lower the duration of civilian
service
to twenty-eight months and resolved that the noncombatant
service
and nonarmed reserve service together not exceed
twenty-eight
months.
Data as of September 1989
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