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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 +. 33 +
