Prime Minister Mikulás Dzurinda stated that his government will not initiate discussions on whether or not to revoke the Benes decrees. Introduced by then President Eduard Benes, from 1945 until 1946 the laws deprived ethnic minorities of their citizenship, appropriated their assets and properties, and resulted in the expulsion and forced deportation of large numbers. The laws gravely affected the ethnic Hungarian and German communities living on the territory of former Czechoslovakia. During the last decades, many attempts to rescind these decrees have failed. [Új Szó (Bratislava/Pozsony), May 11, 2000]

At a Bratislava/Pozsony press conference, Hungarian Coalition Party (HCP) deputy Miklós Fehér reiterated HCP’s position that, in the process of amending the constitution, the preamble be changed to “We, the citizens of the Slovak Republic” from “We, the Slovak nation.” Another possible solution, according to Fehér, would be to omit the whole preamble as is. The deputy also pointed out the need to establish the office of the ombudsman for human rights. [Új Szó (Bratislava/Pozsony), May 18, 2000]

The Parliament approved the law on unrestricted access to information [see report of April 26, 2000]. The new law includes the provision that information must also be made available in the given minority language(s) of those communities that are at minimum 20 percent minority inhabited. [Új Szó (Bratislava/Pozsony), May 18, 2000]

At a regular meeting of the government, the other three members of the governing coalition failed to support the Hungarian Coalition Party’s (HCP) bill on land ownership. The draft, among other things, proposed that the deadline for submitting evidence of land ownership be prolonged until 2005 from the current one of September 2000. Should the parliament fail to endorse HCP’s version, 450,000 hectares of land will be nationalized within a year, warned HCP Vice President László Gyurovszky. [Új Szó (Bratislava/Pozsony), May 11, 2000]

Most of the Hungarian-inhabited municipalities are experiencing a steady decrease in their population, revealed the Hungarian-language daily Új Szó. As an example, the newspaper pointed to Gbelce/Köbölkút, an overwhelmingly ethnic Hungarian-inhabited village in the Nové Zámky/Érsekújvár district where—according to Köbölkút Mayor Ferenc Kovács—38 people died last year and only 11 were born. The leadership of the village decided to reward each newborn’s family with a 10,000 Korunas (approx. $220) bonus. [Új Szó (Bratislava/Pozsony), May 4, 2000]