Support for refugees fleeing Ukraine through our church
2022-03-09
Brief summary about our history
2023-08-30
I am Gábor Iványi, the president-pastor of the Hungarian Evangelical Fellowship (HEF) and also the president of the Oltalom Charity Society. HEF is the 4th largest church in Hungary, which provides educational, social, health care and spiritual help through its institutions to 20,000 people and families living in deep poverty and disadvantaged circumstances. I have invited the distinguished members of the press to attempt to make a cry to the democratic and constitutional part of the world about the impossible situation of those who work for the poorest and openly stand up for
human rights, which are trampled underfoot by the so-called supreme representatives of the Hungarian state today, in the Orbán dictatorship. The persecution against us is a message to the other churches and to a significant part of society that is doomed to fail.
Today’s meeting was necessitated by the fact that – apparently on the orders of Viktor Orbán – the National Tax and Customs Office (NAV) has deducted almost the entire amount of the normative subsidy for our institutions, some 175 million HUF, for late interest and other debts, which is the reason why we were unable to pay salaries to our thousand employees this month. I note that the Hungarian state, including the NAV (which we are now suing), owes us some 12 billion HUF.
Last year, we produced a short summary of the history of our church, HEF, in English, which is available for anyone to take away. It shows that it was just fifty years ago, in the summer of 1973, that we were expelled from the Methodist Church in Hungary for protesting against state interference in the internal affairs of our church. After eight years of struggle, on 1 October 1981, we became an independent church with full rights, established and recognised under that name. This status was confirmed before the change of regime, together with all the other churches in Hungary
at the time, by Law 4 of 1990.
After the regime change, we created social, educational, health and cultural institutions. We have press products (Life and Light monthly, the cultural street magazine Star Hotel, the periodical educational publication New Magister and a small radio station called Radio Oltalom). We have a book publishing house, a college (John Wesley Theological College), which now has a doctoral school, too. There is a hospital and clinic, public education facilities for about 3,000 children, including art education in several places. We have a network of homeless institutions with meals, health care and accommodation, and several social homes for the elderly. We also provide extensive family care alongside religious activities in the church. Approximately 20,000 people use our services. Most of them are the poorest in Hungary.
Our support is even higher, with the 1% of tax contributions mounting to 52000 in 2022 – making us the fourth most supported church. This year’s numbers are not yet known, but it is unlikely that the attention toward us has decreased.
Our institutional difficulties stem from the fact that the Fidesz government revoked our church status in 2011 with explicitly punitive intentions, on false grounds. This deprived us of essential additional support, at least forty percent of our budget. Although both the Hungarian Constitutional Court and the Strasbourg Court of Human Rights have ruled that the removal of our church (and many other denominations) status was unlawful and unconstitutional and must be restored as of 1 January 2012, the government has never done so, instead changing the terms of the Church Act again and again to create a legal basis for further harassment and oppression.
On the basis of our 1% tax subsidy, the court ruled that we were entitled to the third step of the procedure for becoming a church under the Hungarian Church Act (1. association carrying out religious activities, 2. established church, 3. registered church, 4. established and recognised church), but the prosecution appealed this, which the Curia accepted for a hearing, but has not set a date for it for more than a year. We can move on to Strasbourg once we have exhausted our domestic legal possibilities.
A registered church can initiate a comprehensive agreement with the Hungarian state (we already had such an agreement with the then government in 2006), only such an agreement would allow us to become a recognized church, which automatically entitles us to additional support – I note that this would take us back to our legal status on 1 October 1981. However, for the second year running, Zsolt Semjén, the responsible government official, has not even replied to our letter.
Our educational institutions have had the last of their departmental grants taken away, claiming that our work in education for the poor is “not a return on investment”. Later, the responsible Secretary of State suggested in a letter that if we do not have enough budget money, we should charge tuition fees from our students, the vast majority of whom have access to regular hot meals and other services only in our institutions.
Our persecution for more than a decade is based on two things. The first is that we serve the bottom layer of society that the greedy, corrupt Orban regime refuses to support, to whom it refuses to provide decent jobs, housing and opportunities for advancement. The so-called public work that is occasionally available reaches only some of the people concerned, and such work has not been designed for these people but rather for the thousands of guest workers who are being imported from the Far East.
The other aspect is that we are openly opposed to the arrogance of the power that disregards our fundamental rights to an independent press, freedom of speech and the free exercise of religion (because they have mortgaged our religious buildings, too), free and fair education, humane health care. We protest against the unfair electoral law, the discrimination in the judicial process and corruption on an unprecedented scale. We find unacceptable the dishonest, disloyal behaviour of our
country to our alliance systems (EU, NATO). We are convinced that the elimination of the serious internal conflicts and crimes in Hungary, but also the guarantee of our staying out of a possible war, is the guarantee that the current government will leave and account for its crimes.
The Hungarian State is run by people who, in a decent democracy and a state governed by the rule of law, would spend a long time in prison. They make no secret of the fact that their legislation, their investments and their spending are aimed solely at increasing their own wealth and preserving their power. One example, among countless criminal and senseless squandering of money and privatisation, is the outrageous image that many people have of the 30 billion HUF (8.5 billion USD) yacht of Lőrinc Mészáros, who was raised by Orbán and made rich. If this amount of money had been
used to finance the tasks of our network of institutions, which has a budget of 6 billion HUF (1,7 million USD) a year, it would have been possible to finance these services for five years. What is more, it costs 81 million HUF (229000 USD) to refuel this yacht – so we can say that a little more than the price of two tankfuls of petrol has now been taken away from us.
This international press conference was necessary because if the Orbán dictatorship manages to crush the last symbol of democracy, it sends the message that anything can happen in the European Union (or anywhere else) without any consequences. What is happening now may appear to be a minor local affair, but it is in fact a serious attack on a democratic world by a government that was planning its final, fatal blow for the summer holidays. It is a brutal attack on all those who imagine their future in a democracy.
Thank you for your attention.
