Pressure is mounting on Hungary’s head of state to resign after it was revealed she issued a presidential pardon to a man convicted as an accomplice in a child sexual abuse case.

The lawmaker, Olga Kálmán, said the pardon had expunged the criminal record of the children’s home’s former deputy director and allowed him to work among children again.

“This pardon means that from now on, he has no criminal record and has not been barred from practicing his vocation. From the moment of his pardon, he can go back to working in an orphanage,” Kálmán told the AP.

In a Facebook post on Tuesday, one of the sex abuse survivors, Mert Pop, wrote in a comment that Novák’s decision “deprives victims of due justice,” and that “the obscurity surrounding the pardoned offender provokes deep concern among those who have suffered, and in society at large.”

  • nkat2112English
    7•9 months ago

    BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) — Pressure is mounting on Hungary’s head of state to resign after it was revealed that she issued a presidential pardon to a man convicted as an accomplice in a child sexual abuse case.

    Hungary’s opposition parties say that President Katalin Novák, Hungary’s one-time minister for families and a close ally of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, is no longer fit to hold office after she pardoned the former deputy director of a state-run children’s home last year.

    The man was sentenced to more than three years in prison in 2018 for helping to cover up the sexual abuse committed by the institution’s director, who himself was sentenced to eight years for his abuse of at least 10 children between 2004 and 2016.

    Novák, who issued the pardon along with around two dozen others on the occasion of Pope Francis’ April 2023 visit to Hungary, has denied that she acted improperly and rejected calls for a formal explanation of her decision.

    It’s all about projection, hypocrisy, narcissism from any of these parties of “family values” and “law and order.”

    And then to blatantly lie:

    “Under my presidency, there has not been and will not be pardons for pedophiles, as it was in this case,” she said during a news conference on Tuesday.

    Novák’s office did not respond to an Associated Press request for comment.