SZEMA - Free People for Hungary/Liberal Party

Digest of Newsletter I/7, 28 July 2011

Vigil for freedom of conscience and religion

Rev. Gábor Iványi, head of the Gospel Brotherhood of Hungary, a Methodist church, made a call for a communal vigil for freedom of conscience and religion, and a night of brotherly/sisterly solidarity from 5 p. m. on 28 July to 5 a. m. on 29 July, at the church's headquarters in Budapest. This was in response to new legislation (Act 100/2011) that discriminates amongst churches, disregards free and peaceful coexistence among them, and obliges all denominations but a privileged 14 to apply for registration as a church. There was no consultation with the churches before the legislation was drafted. He points out that his church, formed thirty years ago after a dispute over interference by the communist authorities, runs vital programmes of assistance to the homeless, the aged, and children, including social, health-care and educational institutions.

Remembering the Roma victims of the Holocaust

The meeting of mourning at 10 a. m. on 2 August, at the Roma Holocaust Memorial in Budapest's Nehru Park was to be a quiet one in which participants were asked to lay a flower or a lamp at the foot of the monument in memory of some 3000 Roma who were exterminated by the Nazis on the night of the second to third of August 1944 at Camp II.E., Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Condolences were expressed by SZEMA to the relatives of victims and to the Norwegian people after the Oslo bombing and the slaughter on Utoya Island.

No to the irredentist demonstration

The party calls on the interior minister and the police to prevent the "64 Counties" group from holding a demonstration on Shipyard Island during the Festival there on 8–15 August.

Expropriation of pension funds

A press report from Berlin recalling that 2.9 million privately insured Hungarian employees were coerced into contributing their accumulated payments into the state scheme forecasts that a further 5 million will be hit by higher contributions and lower eventual benefits, as part of the government's ill-conceived low-tax economic plans.

September SZEMA discussion evening

The subject will be the gender policies of cultured democratic states and the right to sexual equality. The date will be announced later.