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“THE ‘ETERNAL CANDIDATE’ — THAT WAS ME”: INTERVIEW WITH KAROLY BARD
Socialist Party and Alliance of Free Democrats) government. On the one hand,
I was thankful for the trust vested in me. On the other hand, with time I was
burdened with so much work that I couldn’t cope anymore. In the end, they
dumped almost all of these tasks on me, from the codification of criminal law,
through the administration of pardons to the implementation of international
treaties and finally, also the legislative compliance with EU law. At the same time,
the Minister wanted me to accompany him on his trips abroad, so I was constantly
on the road. To make matters worse, instead of the politicians it was me, who was
sent to take part in all criminal law related debates in parliamentary committees
and in the media. Of course, my staff enjoyed the attention, and that we were the
elite within the ministry that got everything done. But it came to a point where I
felt that the way things were going was unfair.
Plus, I got tired of the endless consultations with the other ministries, the
Supreme Court and the Office of the Prosecutor General, who always wanted to
have their say in the codification work. It was just like before the change of political
system, the only difference being that at the time, the Supreme Court has less
clout. Meanwhile, the opposition kept admonishing us, claiming that criminal
law legislation was not making progress. We had a lot of work to do, but I didn’t
have enough people and soon I was physically worn out. In the end, it got to the
point where my stomach burned every time I passed the Parliament on my way
to the Ministry.
There was a specific case whenI was deeply hurt and I cannot forget, perhaps
out of vanity. The MDF government rushed the lustration law (called Agent
Act) through Parliament and wanted to elect lustration judges before the end
of their mandate. I was called in by the National Security Committee to talk to
the candidate judges about the law that annulled politically motivated judgments
rendered in the former regime and the lustration law. I wasn’t told, however, what
questions they wanted to discuss. I thought that they were thinking of discussing
one or two complex paragraphs that make candidates for the position non-eligible.
It turned out, they wanted me to elaborate on things even a fourth grader knows.
I would never have thought I would have to explain these issues to a group of
elderly lawyers.
With the exception of a few older judges, nobody wanted to be a lustration judge.
And it turned out that those who had applied could not fill these positions because
of the judgments they had rendered in the previous regime. Yet the government
did not want to end its mandate without appointing lustration judges. And this is
whenl was called in to talk about exclusion rules in general, instead of rejecting
the applicants outright. In 1995 a scandal broke out that the lustration judges
were appointed unlawfully and they wanted the President of the Supreme Court,
who had sat through this whole farce, and myself, to take the blame. They even
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