President urged expediting clemency case in 2023 citing upcoming papal visit

“This is not the end of this matter "- Péter Magyar said at the press briefing at the Alkotmány street seat of the Prime Minister's office. The event was called for Tuesday morning to coincide with the Tisza government’s release of half of the documentation pertaining to the pardon case, which had been kept at the Ministry of Justice until now.

The file, which also included Endre K.'s case contained several other cases, Péter Magyar explained, after the published documents—which included a total of 49 pardon requests—were projected onto a screen. “These documents show that the relevant department was not in favor of granting Endre K.’s pardon request,” —said the Prime Minister regarding the document, which also makes mention of the forthcoming visit of Pope Francis to Hungary. Indeed, a memo dated April 17, 2023, reveals that the then-Minister of Justice, Judit Varga, did not support granting the pardon.

Another document states that Katalin Novák made the decision to grant clemency to Endre K. on 27 April 2023, which, according to the document, Judit Varga countersigned that same day—something Péter Magyar finds very strange. This is because according to normal procedure, following the president’s decision, the official document is normally returned to the Ministry of Justice, where it first passes through the hands of several officials before making its way back to the Minister of Justice for countersigning. As Péter Magyar noted, this could take up to several weeks.

The Ministry of Justice did not recommend that Endre K. be granted a presidential pardon, but it did support other requests.

Magyar said that Endre K.'s case had been included among these supported decisions, after which, the official chain of command was bypassed in order to have Judit Varga sign them “somewhere” on the same day. According to the documents, Katalin Novák specifically requested at the time that the pardon decision be finalized before the papal visit.

At the press conference following the new government's first cabinet meeting last Wednesday, Péter Magyar had stated that there were two separate dossiers of the clemency case: one is at the Ministry of Justice and another one at the Presidential Palace (Sándor Palota). He said at the time that he believed the complete documentation could only be found in the latter, so he did not expect the dossier at the Ministry of Justice to reveal much.

“I believe that more information can be found in the complete file kept at the Presidential Palace”, the Prime Minister said.

We still don’t know for what reasons or on what grounds President Katalin Novák decided to change the decision in this case, said Péter Magyar,

also announcing that the Tisza faction will propose setting up a parliamentary investigative committee. “Now that we are making one half of the pardon dossier public, and we are expecting the President of the Republic to release [the other half], it will become clear—provided Tamás Sulyok does not once again go against the will of the millions of Hungarian people who brought about the change of government—whether anything is written down in there”, he explained.

The scandal that led to the birth of the Tisza Party

The clemency scandal was the biggest political scandal of recent years in Hungary, causing the downfall of President Katalin Novák and former Justice Minister Judit Varga within eight days—though Zoltán Balog, the Reformed bishop who played a key role in the affair, remained largely unscathed.

The scandal broke just over two years ago, after it was revealed on February 2, 2024, that then-President Katalin Novák had granted a presidential pardon to K. Endre, the former deputy director of the Bicske children’s home convicted of coercion for helping the paedophile director convicted of sexual offences cover up his crime. K. was convicted because he had coerced a child who had been sexually abused by the then-director into retracting his testimony.

Since the change of regime in Hungary, there has been only one instance in which the Minister of Justice did not countersign the President’s pardon decision: in 1998, Minister Ibolya Dávid submitted bank executive Péter Kunos’s request to then President Árpád Göncz with a recommendation that it be rejected. Göncz granted a pardon to the former head of Agrobank, but Dávid, who served as Minister of Justice at the time did not sign the document.

To this day, Katalin Novák has not disclosed why she granted a pardon to Endre K., and Judit Varga did not reveal what recommendation she had made to the President of the Republic regarding Endre K.’s pardon request during her time as justice minister. Gergely Gulyás, who was Minister of the Prime Minister’s Office at the time, said at a government briefing last year that he knew what Varga had proposed but would not reveal it. Katalin Novák, meanwhile, stated that she had made the decision herself, and that from that perspective, it was irrelevant whether she had acted on someone’s recommendation, under pressure, or without any outside pressure. It has still not come to light what role Viktor Orbán, as prime minister, may have played in the pardon affair.

In any case, it was on the heels of the clemency scandal that Péter Magyar—previously known primarily as Judit Varga’s ex-husband—emerged from obscurity and built himself up to the point where he is now Hungary’s Prime Minister. As head of government, he has also ordered the Minister of the Interior and the Minister of Justice to conduct an expedited investigation into the violations that occurred at the Bicske children’s home between 2005 and 2025 by August 31.