“For more than three years, parliament has failed to meet the obligation it set for itself,” said Klára Sándor of the FIDESZ (Alliance of Free Democrats), the junior party in the Socialist-led coalition. In a report, the London-based human rights group outlined measures it said the Hungarian government needed to implement — from better legislation to the need to address prejudice against rape victims among police and the justice system and the lack of accurate statistical data on sex crimes.
“The UN and the Council of Europe made similar recommendations in 2002 and the government hasn’t acted in five years,” said Márk Fodor, director of Amnesty International Hungary. “We have some serious problems. How many more women will be raped before they start tackling the situation?” Reacting to the report, a government lawmaker vowed her party would call on parliament to adopt a comprehensive national plan to suppress domestic sexual violence, which it was supposed to have done by 2004.
According to the report “Cries Unheard — The failure to protect women from rape and sexual violence in the home,” two-thirds of sex crimes reported in Hungary are committed by people known to the victim and the number of sex crimes reported in Hungary is far lower than in other European countries with similar populations. While 803 sex crimes were reported in Hungary in 2004 and 876 in 2005, there were 1,752 cases in Sweden in 2001. Bea Sándor, who participated in the preparation of the report, said it was impossible to estimate the real number of sex crimes here, but mentioned a 1999 poll of over 1,000 women in which 2.5% of respondents said they had been raped and another 5% said they had been forced to have sex.
Hungary’s penal code is inadequate because its definition of rape forces women to prove that they physically resisted their attackers, no matter the level of threat of violence faced, the study said. Women also face discrimination from police and within the justice system when reporting sex crimes. “There are very serious procedural problems, as they are working based on prejudices where they assume that the woman is lying,” Fodor said. “They won’t investigate properly.” Women also faced prejudice from the general population, with more than 32% of those taking part in a 2006 poll saying that women were responsible for being raped, the report said.
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