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At the motion of the opponents of the League of the Death Penalty, the Constitutional Court announced in public session on October 24, 1990, its decision declaring the death penalty unconstitutional. The constitutional judges referred to two constitutional points:
- all human beings have an innate right to life and human dignity,
- No one will be arbitrarily deprived of his life.
Twenty-four arguments
Constitutional Judge Péter Schmidt attached a separate opinion to the decision. With this, he explained later,
I have drawn attention to the fact that there are points in the constitution from which the prohibition of the death penalty can be deduced, and there are others that mean the opposite. This contradiction must be resolved in any case. As the contradiction is in the constitution, its resolution is not the competence of the Constitutional Court, but of the National Assembly.
The constitutional judge in the case, Ádám Antal, also gave some insight into the secrets behind the scenes:
The panel ranked twenty-four main arguments in favor of its position, while examining twenty-three counterarguments over many months. The coincidence brought the twenty-fourth argument to be a fair trial, that is, if someone is executed in error, he cannot be revived, an execution carried out on the basis of a wrong judgment can never be restored.
THERE COULD HAVE BEEN JUSTIZMORD SINCE 1990, consider, for example, the case of EDIS KAISER, who was convicted of wrongful miscarriage for MORI 2002 MASS SACRIFICE, nine years later.
There was a constitutional judge who did not agree with the abolition of the death penalty. János Strausz, a recently deceased criminal judge who served on the panel from 1998 to 2004, expressed a “dissenting opinion” in an interview:
The abolition of the death penalty is just one of the many dogmas of the 20th century, which is not true […] In such an era to preach the abolition of the death penalty in addition to complicity in sin, quasi-advocacy.
One of the invited experts in constitutional court proceedings, law professor József Földvári, was still an abolitionist in 1990, but in 2002, according to a statement, he was no longer:
I would write an opinion in the opposite direction in the opposite direction to the previous one […] society is still not ready today for the abolition of the death penalty.
Retaliation and executions
In times of wars and revolutions, the most brutal form of retaliation was execution and, in peacetime, criminal justice. After the Revolution and the War of Independence of 1848-1849, some 120 people (including the thirteen martyrs of Arad) were shot or hanged after a court martial. Forty more people (including several priests and employees) were shot or “murdered” after improvised procedures. Albert Váry, the Royal Prosecutor General of Budapest, estimated the death toll in the red terror of 1918-1919 at 590. The ensuing white terror had about three hundred victims. After 1945, the people’s courts sentenced 477 people to death, of whom 189 were executed. According to legal historian Frigyes Kahler, 229 people were executed in connection with the 1956 revolution.
As for the “times of peace”, between 1923 and 1941 there were 33, between 1952 and 1956 80, between 1962 and 1987 118 people were sentenced to death in Hungary. Between 1960 and 1988, the military courts imposed the death penalty in 66 cases. The last one took place on July 14, 1988. 28-year-old Ernő Vadász was convicted of premeditated and for-profit manslaughter, committed a grand robbery, and was executed in the prison and prison execution court. of Budapest for improper use of a document. (The last beheading was carried out on September 17, 1852 in Sátoraljaújhely, where 24-year-old Kálász Rozália was dragged into a losing bank for having poisoned her husband and stepchildren with arsenic.)
Death sentences in the world
To date, 142 countries have abolished the death penalty in law or in practice, while 56 countries still thrive on this form of punishment. In 2019, executions were reported in 20 countries, 657 times (excluding China, where these data were declared state secrets), and more than 25,000 were bribed on death row. In 2019, 86 percent of executions occurred in four countries: Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Egypt.
Belarus is the only European country where executions are still taking place today. There is a moratorium in Russia (the last execution took place in 1999). Hungary gave up its use as thirty-sixth in chronological order, ahead of Italy (1994), Spain (1995), Belgium (1996) and Great Britain (1998).
The abolition of the death penalty is most opposed in Asia, the Arab countries and the United States. Four fifths of the 55 African countries have already abolished the death penalty or there is a moratorium.
In the United States, the death penalty is legal in 29 member states; however, no one has been executed at the federal level since 2003 and the number of death sentences has decreased in every state. In this regard, Texas leads the list, where 563 people have been executed since 1976. It is also a telling fact that 166 people executed in the United States in half a century were subsequently found to have died innocently.
I understood America through the death penalty, said David Garland, an American criminologist and professor at New York University. “I understand that the United States is not in many ways a country, but a continental alliance of different states, regions, ethnicities, religions, and classes. The political system created two hundred years ago is called upon to form a unity from differences and at the same time preserve them. The differences were maintained by sharing political power with local leaders. The key to the system is to give the majority a choice. It differs in this from the European federation systems, Germany and Switzerland, where the central will predominates much more. In the United States, the people themselves choose their judges and prosecutors, the people who decide whether or not someone is guilty. All this connects the population with the legal system.
Why can’t it be restored?
Unsurprisingly, the Hungarian public is massively in favor of the death penalty. According to a survey conducted by Závecz Research in October 2017, 24 percent of respondents fully supported, 52 percent accepted the death penalty for certain crimes against life, 21 percent rejected it completely, and 3 percent. One hundred could not or did not want to answer.
Despite all this, the most severe punishment cannot be reinstated either, because Hungary is obliged to comply with it by international treaties:
- Article 1 of Additional Protocol No. 6 to the European Convention on Human Rights states: “The death penalty will be abolished. No one will be sentenced to death or executed. ” (Promulgated by Law XXXI of 1993)
- Article 1 of the Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights establishes: “Persons under the jurisdiction of the States Parties to this Protocol shall not be executed.” (Promulgated by Law II of 1995)
- As a member of the European Union, Hungary is also bound by Article 2 (2) of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, adopted in December 2000, which states: “No one may be sentenced to death or executed”.
And it would be necessary
The death penalty debate erupts after nearly all flagrantly serious crimes.
Tamás Tóth, the first mayor of Sárszentmihály, was the first to initiate the reinstatement of punishment. A criminal couple committed a series of robberies and murders in the early 1990s, and one of the armed attacks also killed Tóth’s son. The perpetrators were sentenced to life imprisonment, but according to the rules of the time, the subsequent conditional release of the perpetrators could not be ruled out. Tóth began collecting signatures in 1996, and although he managed to gather the number of signatures necessary to call the referendum, the referendum was not ordered by parliament because the National Electoral Commission rejected the initiative.
In the summer of 1996, Gyula Horn’s declaration by the then Prime Minister that the referendum on the abolition of the death penalty should be held in the constitutional process also elicited a huge response, and if the people “decide” they will vote in favor. . Justice Minister Paul Vastagh was quick to help his boss saying that the prime minister, who later said he would only say yes to the referendum, expressed his personal opinion on the matter.
Former Prime Minister Péter Boross spoke much more diplomatically in parliament in 2000:
I am not against the death penalty when it comes to crimes committed with particular cruelty, but we are not in a position to become independent by ending international treaties.
After the bank robbery in Mór in 2002, Viktor Orbán, in a radio interview, considered that the reinstatement of the death penalty should be seriously considered. He himself had previously considered this sanction inappropriate, but his opinion changed after personally meeting the victims’ families.
It is true that international treaties still do not allow this form of punishment to be restored. “
The Prime Minister added.
When 26-year-old psychologist Kata Bándy was assassinated in the summer of 2012 in Pécs, the Kisgazda Civic Association demanded the reinstatement of the death penalty to protect society. In the fall of the same year, after the murder of 11-year-old Bence Szita, Jobbik took the lead in the movement.
In 2014, János Lázár de Fidesz took the side of the death penalty following the triple murder in Bátmonostor, while in 2015 Viktor Orbán said in relation to the tragic murder in Kaposvár that
the issue of the death penalty should remain on the agenda.
Death of death
How is there a more dissuasive sanction than the death penalty?
According to a 2008 study from the National Institute of Criminology, yes. Researchers interviewed 149 life-sentenced inmates, including nine life-sentenced prisoners, and more than two-thirds of those convicted found the death penalty to be less dissuasive than actual life in prison.
(Cover image: Execution of those sentenced to death by the People’s Court as war criminals on March 12, 1946. From left to right: Ferenc Szálasi, Gábor Vajna, former Minister of the Interior, Károly Beregfy, former Minister of War, József Gera , former director of construction of the Sagittarius party. Photo: Fortepan / FORTEPAN)
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