A series of meetings of the Hungarian-Slovak mixed minority affairs committee was concluded in Budapest on Wednesday, Ferenc Kalmar, the committee’s Hungarian co-chair, said after the event.
Although the talks started in 2022, there were issues that had remained unresolved that year, said Kalmar, adding that after several rounds of consultations, a final document had been drafted.
He said the minutes of the talks would be submitted for discussion to both governments. “The Hungarian government will then prepare an action plan in line with the minutes.. and the Slovak government will also take action on the basis of the document in the interest of improving the minority situation,” said Kalmar.
In the document, the mixed committee welcomed the establishment of a Slovak minority fund and the Slovak government’s decision against merging it with another fund, the co-chair said.
Kalmar noted that according to the document, the Slovak state will continue talks with the Reformed Church on the issue of expropriations conducted in the 1940s on properties that had not been subject to the restitution law and will not cut “the level of support” to the Selye Janos University of Komarno (Revkomarom) in southern Slovakia.
The document welcomed statements by the new Slovak government and Peter Pellegrini, the newly elected president, “based on which Slovakia has entered the group of sovereigntist and pro-peace countries”, he said.
Miroslav Mojzita, the committee’s Slovak co-chair, welcomed the signing of the document with which he said a process could be brought to an end “after disruptions caused by the Covid pandemic and various problems over the past three years”.
He praised the work of the mixed committee, noting that it had addressed minority issues over the course of 15 meetings held since the signing of an inter-state treaty in 1995, adding that the governments of the two countries had always implemented the points agreed upon.
