HUNGARY OPENS COMMUNIST-ERA SECRET POLICE INFORMANT FILES

Hungary has opened its communist-era secret police files, naming around 60,000 people recruited as informants by the state security services. The files appeared on the website nyitottaktak.hu on 4 November, the anniversary of the 1956 Soviet crushing of Hungary's uprising. Prime Minister Péter Magyar's government ordered the release, fulfilling a pledge from his Tisza party's election campaign. "I ask everyone to treat this long overdue publication of documents with dignity and humanity," Magyar told reporters at the state archives in Budapest. He said many families would face difficult information about a deceased relative.

Calls to release the files date back more than three decades, to the end of Soviet-backed rule in 1989. Hungary's first post-Communist prime minister, Jozsef Antall, rejected publishing them, as did Viktor Orbán's Fidesz party, which voted against it more than 30 times since 2010, according to the Hungarian news platform Telex. Parliament passed an "agents law" in 1994 requiring background checks on government members, MPs and some public servants. Citizens have been able to view their own files since the late 1990s, though the security services blacked out many names and withheld some. Each entry records an informant's name, codename, date of birth, address, mother's name and handling officer, plus whether recruitment was voluntary or forced.

The pledge was central to the Tisza party's campaign before Magyar's landslide election victory in April. He described the release as the fulfilment of a promise made by those who toppled the Communist party in 1989. Critics have said the move comes too late and that the files are incomplete. They warned that publishing the records risks sowing division and anguish among relatives of those named.