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On Tuesday morning, the Mansion decided to request a review of the school segregation lawsuit in Gyöngyöspata, which was filed by school maintainers, Gyöngyöspata township, and Hatvan Tank District to compensate students in kind instead of money.
The mansion rejected the request and confirmed the decision of Debrecen’s panel.
This means that the 99 million HUF previously awarded in compensation must be paid to the 60 Roma students in Gyöngyöspata who were illegally separated from their peers at Nekcsei Demeter Primary School in Gyöngyöspata and received a lower educational level.
Compensation can only be paid in cash
The Mansion did not find the review requests to be exhaustive, read their statement issued Tuesday afternoon. Based on the Civil Code, decades of jurisprudence and legal literature, it has been established that
In the case of compensation for non-pecuniary damages, the only way to assess compensation is monetary compensation, there is no legal possibility of applying compensation in kind.
They write that the replacement of monetary damages through training could only be carried out with the parties’ extrajudicial agreement, but this did not happen because the families involved did not accept the government’s offer.
The Gyöngyöspata municipality also asked the court to reduce the amount of damages, but the Curia saw no basis for this, because the court of appeals “established it with due diligence … with due justification.”
Roma students were segregated for 14 years.
The first instance sentence was handed down by the Eger Court in October 2018, and then the Debrecen Arbitration Board, approving this, issued a final court decision in September 2019.
It was discovered that between 2003 and 2017, segregated education took place at the school in Gyöngyöspata, and the practice of segregated education violated the rights of Roma students, for which the municipality and the tank district must pay them compensation. According to the ruling, 60 young Roma from Gyöngyöspata (or their families in the case of minors) were entitled to a total of HUF 99 million in compensation.
No compensation was paid
Gyöngyöspata does not ask for money from the Soros network!
– Evaluates the judicial decision of László Horváth, member of the Fidesz Parliament of the region, in early January, a few days before the deadline for the payment of compensation. He added that “this decision may be legal but unfair, unilateral, excessive and destructive.” According to him, Roma families affected by the Opportunity Foundation for Disadvantaged Children, which is part of the Soros network, took the opportunity to sue.
The defendants filed a request for review and requested suspension of payment, but the latter was rejected by the Mansion.
Instead, the government began consultations with affected families in Gyöngyöspata to provide them with compensation not in cash but in education and training opportunities, because, according to Orbán, “the way to catch up also leads the Roma to study and work” .
The government’s offer was not accepted by the Gyöngyöspata families, but no enforcement was initiated against the township and the tank district, but they waited for the Mansion to decide on the request for review, which Emmi expedited with an emergency request.
Government attack on court ruling
Meanwhile, the government tried to pressure the Mansion with a spectacular political campaign and kept the issue on the agenda for weeks in parallel with the damage to the prison. The machine was started by Viktor Orbán when he spoke at an international press conference earlier this year that the verdict in the damages lawsuit violated people’s sense of justice.
If I lived there, I would still ask how, for some reason, members of an ethnically dominant ethnic group living with me in a community, in a village, would receive a significant sum without any kind of work.
– said the Prime Minister. According to him, this is not so good, and “we must do justice to the people of Gyöngyöspata.”
He later added in a radio interview that he would offend the Hungarians’ sense of justice “if we don’t give money for nothing.”
He said there was “an unfortunate court verdict” and indeed “Soros’s network is behind this.”
Thousands protested free courts
This opinion was later expressed by István Hollik, Zoltán Kovács, Bence Rétvári, Zoltán Maruzsa, Lívia Járóka and László Böröcz.
The public would also have been asked about the fairness of the court’s ruling in a national consultation, but it was eventually delayed due to the epidemic.
In late February, however, thousands attended Free Court! Free Accounts! at a demonstration in Budapest. The protesters demanded that the government not exert political pressure on the courts and that the Mansion be free to decide the demands of the Gony people. According to the government, however, the aim of the movement was only to incite Hungarians and Roma among themselves in the “Red Soros” in the matter of the Gyöngyöspata school.
The compensation debate finally ended with the internal outbreak of the coronavirus epidemic, which has been off the political agenda since March.
Roma students could not climb the stairs
The current Judgment of the Sixth Court, which ruled on the responsibility of the school and the manager, once referred the matter to the Mansion.
The background to the lawsuit was the 2011 report by Ernő Kállai, a former ombudsman for minority rights, in which he discovered that students were being illegally segregated at Nekcsei Demeter Primary School in Gyöngyöspata.
According to the report, Roma students were physically segregated at school, with Roma classes on the ground floor and non-Roma classes on the first floor. Students in Rome could not even go to the bathroom, go to kindergarten or could not be banned from swimming lessons.
Based on this ombudsman’s report, the foundation filed its complaint a few months later after its staff had spent months at the school gathering material for the lawsuit.
Erzsébet Mohácsi, the former director of the foundation, told 168 Hours that despite the fact that they were looking for the local government to maintain the school, they were not open to dialogue.
School and custodian required to complete segregation
On December 6, 2012, the Eger Court issued a judgment determining illegal segregation and also stated that Roma students received a lower quality education.
THE COURT REQUIRED THE SCHOOL AND THE SUSTAINABLE MUNICIPALITY TO ELIMINATE SEGREGATION.
The local government, because then they still maintained the schools. The case continued at the Metropolitan Trial Board and then reached the Mansion. While schools have been nationalized, in addition to the school and the municipality, there has also been a third defendant, the Klebelsberg Institutional Maintenance Center (Klik).
The court ruling was not followed
On March 25, 2015, the Mansion confirmed the final judgment of the Metropolitan Trial Panel, stating that
Neither the educational institution nor its manager fulfilled their obligation to integrate, they maintained the situation that had developed in the school as a result of spontaneous segregation.
However, there was no issue of compensation here yet, it was a so-called public interest lawsuit initiated by the foundation. However, the segregation of the Roma has not yet ended in school, so the Chance for Disadvantaged Children Foundation filed another lawsuit in December 2015, demanding compensation for 63 Roma students in Gyöngyöspata for school segregation. The students requested 500,000 forints for each school year they spent in the segregated class, for which the defendants were sued for a total of 209 million forints.
This lawsuit now ended after the Mansion rejected the defendants’ request for review and approved the September decision of the Debrecen Judgment Panel.
(Cover image: Participants in the free court! Free demonstration of Gyöngyöspata! In Budapest on February 23, 2020. Photo: István Huszti / Index)
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