Nearly 8,000 Sign Petition Against Slovak Law Criminalizing Criticism of Postwar Beneš Decrees

A petition calling for an end to ongoing property confiscations carried out under the Beneš decrees and for redress of injustices from the 1940s has gathered nearly 8,000 signatures in Slovakia. The petition was initiated by lawyer János Fiala-Butora, Hungarian Alliance politician Örs Orosz, and activist Attila Stubendek, and was addressed to the Slovak president, parliament, and government. The petition was launched in direct response to parliament's approval of an amendment to the Criminal Code that makes it a criminal offense to question the Beneš decrees. The Beneš decrees were a series of postwar measures issued by Czechoslovak President Edvard Beneš after World War II that, among other consequences, authorized the mass confiscation of property from ethnic Germans and Hungarians living in Czechoslovakia. Decades later, some of those confiscations remain legally contested. Fiala-Butora argued that if property rights can still be challenged or undermined 80 years after the fact, it fundamentally erodes legal certainty — a core principle of rule-of-law states. The Hungarian Alliance is a Slovak political party representing the country's ethnic Hungarian minority, which has historically been among those most affected by the decrees. The criminalization of questioning the decrees has raised concerns among legal experts and minority advocates about freedom of expression and the ability to seek historical redress through legal or political channels.