We would only like to achieve that Romania observe its own laws and those of the European Union, the State Secretary for National Policy at the Prime Minister’s Office said at the press conference held on Tuesday in Budapest with respect to the return of Hungarian church properties in Romania confiscated during communism.

Árpád János Potápi stressed that the Hungarian Government is making efforts to help churches, civil society organisations and private individuals beyond the borders with forwarding their submissions to European forums as well as with enabling them to appear before the competent forums. Additionally, the Hungarian Government also seeks to mobilise Hungarian Members of the European Parliament in order to support them and to speak up in their interest at every possible forum. “At the same time, it is not us that should render assistance, but it is the successor states that should observe the laws they created themselves as well as international conventions”, the State Secretary for National Policy said.

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Mr Potápi added: on 5 April a public hearing was held in Brussels regarding “the problems which have accumulated in the process of the return of properties” at the initiative of László Tőkés, Member of the European Parliament for Fidesz-KDNP and Pál Csáky, MEP for the Party of the Hungarian Community, at which Zoltán Lomnici, President of the Council of Human Dignity also spoke up.

Mr Lomnici reiterated: the return of unlawfully confiscated church properties, including Hungarian church properties, was a condition of the accession of Romania to the EU. However, Romania has only assessed one half of the reclamation requests, and just over one third of the reclaimed properties have been returned to church ownership. This problem is all the more serious, he said, because churches played a crucial role in the survival of Hungarian communities in Transylvania before World War II, but even during the communist dictatorship and after the change of regime.

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This is not just about the exercise of religion in the mother tongue, he added, but also about old people’s homes and children’s homes operated by churches. In these children’s homes, a great many Roma children are being looked after. Some one quarter of the Roma community of two million in Transylvania are Hungarian-speaking.

Mr Lomnici told the Hungarian News Agency MTI: he received official notification that Romania has been called upon to answer the questions raised in the petition submitted to the competent committee of the EU in January 2015. No deadline was set for the submission of the answers, and one of the reasons for initiating the public hearing was to urge the acceleration of this process. Following the receipt of the Romanian Government’s answers, the case will be submitted to a political debate in Brussels. He added: he is hoping that the same process will also be applied in the case of church properties in Slovakia where the admissibility of the petition is currently being assessed.

(MTI)