The Slovak State Has Begun Dispossessing Hungarians in Upper Hungary While the EU Remains Silent

Translation of an article originally published in Hungarian by Magyar Jelen on June 26, 2025 by Éva Remenyiczki.

More than eighty years have passed since the end of World War II, yet members of the Hungarian national community still cannot find peace in the territories of former Hungary. When Slovakia was preparing to join the European Union years ago, the issue of the Beneš Decrees emerged as a serious obstacle. At that time, the Slovak state defended itself by claiming these decrees had "no practical application and only historical significance." However, time has proven this to be a lie, as they are still being used in 2025 to seize land from Hungarians.

Although Slovakia became a European Union member state, it still treats the principle of collective guilt as law. The decisions of Edvard Beneš, the president who forged political capital from anti-Hungarian and anti-German sentiments, commonly known as the Beneš Decrees, remain in effect today. Even more scandalous is that they are still being enforced.

Land Seizures Without Any Compensation

Following the war, in 1945 and 1946, Edvard Beneš, the second president of Czechoslovakia, issued 143 presidential decrees. Several of these were specifically aimed at confiscating the property of Hungarian and German minorities and revoking their citizenship.

The 12th and 108th Beneš Decrees, for example, permitted the confiscation of lands belonging to Hungarian and German nationals without any financial compensation, citing collective guilt. 

Anyone of Hungarian or German ethnicity was automatically deemed guilty for the war’s atrocities. This created one of the world's most hypocritical constructions: mass disenfranchisement based on ethnicity.

Unacceptable for an EU Member

When Slovakia was preparing to join the European Union, the issue of the Beneš Decrees became a serious obstacle. Hungarian organizations and political representatives, both inside and outside Slovakia’s borders, protested against keeping these asset-stripping decrees in effect. The Slovak state defended itself at the time by claiming the decrees had "no practical application and only historical significance." However, time has proven this false, as they continue to seize land from Hungarians in 2025 using these same justifications.

In recent years, reports have regularly emerged that Slovak state authorities are once again confiscating land from Hungarian property owners by invoking the Beneš Decrees, even though most of the Hungarian population in Upper Hungary (the historical Hungarian name for Slovakia’s southern regions) is older than Slovakia itself as an independent state.

László Gubík, chairman of the Hungarian Alliance in Slovakia, published a Facebook post showing that the Slovak state is still seizing property from Hungarian families who have held their land for generations; land they originally inherited as part of Hungary.

It is shocking that Slovak authorities still operate under 1940s legal frameworks even in 2025. The Slovak Land Fund has now disputed the property rights of Hungarian families simply because their ancestors were of Hungarian nationality.

Today, it is no longer agricultural land that holds the greatest value but rather properties around Pozsony (Bratislava) where highways and bypass roads are planned. Expropriating these would require compensation, unless a convenient outdated decree is used to avoid paying.

The D4 highway, currently under construction as part of Pozsony’s (Bratislava's) ring road, runs through areas where land has already been confiscated using the Beneš Decrees as justification.
(Photo: Tibor Somogyi)

This is not an isolated incident but a systematic practice backed by the still-valid Beneš Decrees. No other EU member state carries such a shameful stain. The principle of collective guilt exists nowhere else, only in Slovakia.

Hungarians Driven from Their Own Land, But Truth Cannot Be Suppressed Forever

The Beneš Decrees are not "historical artifacts." They are living, valid, and actively applied legal instruments in a country that, as an EU member, committed to respecting human rights.

The Slovak state systematically humiliates, exploits, and disenfranchises Hungarians in Upper Hungary year after year amid EU silence.

What we are witnessing is legal abuse, ethnic exclusion, and collective punishment in 2025, in the heart of the European Union. Hungarians are being driven from their own ancestral lands.

Featured image: Éva Remenyiczki / Magyar Jelen
Source used: polyp.org.uk