Clemency case documents released by Office of Hungarian President

The Office of the President of Hungary has released the documents related to the clemency case on its website on Friday morning. Within minutes, the website crashed, most likely due to the heavy traffic.

The case known as the "clemency scandal" broke just over two years ago, on 2 February 2024, after it was revealed 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, in helping the institution's 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.

Included among the documents is a memo relating to the verdict in the Hunnia case, another memo dated April 3, 2023 on the current status of pardon proposals, and the cover page of the fourth pardon proposal of 2023 submitted by the Minister of Justice.

According to the documents,

similarly to the Minister of Justice, the President’s Office (i.e. her Chief of Staff) did not recommend that Endre K., be granted a pardon, but Katalin Novák decided to grant him a pardon nonetheless, without providing justification.

Under the Fundamental Law of Hungary, granting individual pardons is the exclusive right of the President of the Republic. The President of the Republic is vested with the authority to make a decision on such requests, and is not obliged to follow the recommendation of the Minister of Justice. The President must make an independent decision in each case, but is not required to justify their decision (regardless of whether it is a denial or an approval), and there is no legal remedy against the decision. The presidential pardon only becomes valid once it’s been countersigned by the Minister of Justice, who is entitled to exercise political and governmental discretion.

The office of the President (i.e. the Sándor Palace) told MTI on Friday morning that the President of the Republic has been fully supportive of the investigation into the decision which has come to be known as the “clemency case”—from the very beginning. He is prepared to cooperate with the government to ensure that the public receives an accurate picture of this case, which sparked widespread public outrage in 2024.

In his statement, the President noted that at the same time, he considers it unacceptable that communication between the government and the other branches of power has moved to social media and the press. In recent days, the Office of the President and Péter Magyar have been exchanging messages about whether the government should submit a formal request to the President’s Office to release the documents, or whether it should release them on its own initiative. “Mr. President! Do not wait for instructions from the government! You represent a separate branch of the government. Publish the copy of the pardon dossier in your possession today!” Prime Minister Péter Magyar wrote on Thursday in response to the President's post, in which he said that if the Office of the President receives an official request, it will hand over the documents related to the clemency case to the government.

Our paper had previously sent numerous inquiries to the Prime Minister’s Office to find out who would be sending this official request to the President’s Office and when, but the only response we received was that Péter Magyar had already called on Tamás Sulyok to hand over the documents.

The clemency case was the biggest political scandal of recent years in Hungary, leading to the resignation of President Katalin Novák within eight days and the withdrawal of former Justice Minister Judit Varga (who had countersigned the document) from public life—though Zoltán Balog, the Reformed bishop who played a key role in the affair, is still in office at his church.

Prime Minister Péter Magyar has already released some of the documents earlier this week. While personal and sensitive information has been redacted, the public was still able to learn new and intriguing details about the case. The case holds political significance because Péter Magyar’s political career was launched in the wake of the scandal, and this marked the beginning of the process that ultimately led to Fidesz’s defeat in this April's parliamentary elections.

At the beginning of the week, there were six documents published on the website of the Hungarian government. The most interesting of these revealed that then Justice Minister Judit Varga did not recommend granting a presidential pardon to Endre K. Nevertheless, she later countersigned President Novák's decision. There had previously been press reports suggesting this scenario, but it had not been officially confirmed until now. Additionally, in his April 17, 2023, recommendation, Róbert Répássy, who was State Secretary for Justice (among others, he was responsible for the Pardon Department) at the time, indicated that out of 51 pardon cases related to 49 defendants, pardons were recommended for only three of them, and it appears that K. Endre’s initials were not among these.

Nevertheless, in her presidential decree dated April 27, 2023, Katalin Novák granted a pardon to Endre K., thus overturning the recommendation of the Minister of Justice. According to the decree, the President suspended the enforcement of the remainder of the prison sentence imposed by the final court ruling for a five-year probationary period, waived the enforcement of the remainder of the prohibition from participating in public affairs, and also exempted Endre K.from the disadvantages associated with a criminal record. An important detail is that Novák’s decision also lifted the ban on employment, meaning that K. could once again be allowed to work with children.

In light of this, the question arises as to why Judit Varga countersigned Endre K.’s petition for clemency, given that neither she nor her colleagues had previously recommended granting it. There is no answer to this in the documents published so far.