Hungary Will Review Controversial Treason Trial of Cardinal Mindszenty

A government spokesman said Friday that Hungary’s Supreme Court will review the trial of the late Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty, who was sentenced to life in prison on trumped-up charges of treason.

The government action is considered to amount to Mindszenty’s de facto posthumous rehabilitation.

Spokesman Zsolt Bajnok said the government also decided to rehabilitate about 100,000 Hungarians deported or interned in the early 1950s under the Stalinist rule of then-leader Matyas Rakosi.

The decisions are part of the leadership’s review of Hungary’s past that has led to the rehabilitation of Imre Nagy, leader of the 1956 anti-Stalinist uprising who was executed in 1958, and recognition of his attempted reforms. Many of them are embraced by the current leadership in its own reform drive.

Bajnok said the chief prosecutor concluded that the trial against Mindszenty was solely political and lacked factual basis.

Mindszenty was arrested in 1948 as an enemy of communism. After a humiliating trial, he was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1949. Hungarian revolutionaries freed him from prison during the 1956 uprising. After the revolt was crushed by the Soviets, Mindszenty found shelter in the U.S. mission in Budapest until 1971, when he left the asylum under an agreement worked out between the Vatican and the Hungarian government.

Mindszenty stayed briefly in Rome, then settled in Vienna, where he died on May 6, 1975, at age 83.