Government aims to stop ‘prison business’

The government aims to put a stop to the “prison business” which has grown into a billion-forint “industry”, Justice Minister Judit Varga said in parliament on Thursday, at a plenary debate over compensation payments for poor prison conditions in Hungary.

The bill proposes suspending the payments with immediate effect until June 15, when the new regulation “restoring the natural balance between the compensations for victims and inmates” is expected to pass parliament, the minister said.

The government will then use the results of the national consultation survey on the issue as a guideline for the new regulations, which will scrap the “unfair practices” employed so far and focus on the interests of the victims and their families, she said.

The government is prepared to face international controversy over the issue, Varga said.

Over the past few years the government has built new prisons and continued to develop prison conditions, she said. Overcrowding, the grounds of the compensation lawsuits, is declining, and the inmates have job opportunities, she said.

The government is committed to fully eradicating overcrowding, the minister said.

Varga said the bill also sets a deadline, September 30, to reduce the average occupancy rate of prisons in Hungary to not more than 100 percent.

She noted a 2015 ruling of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), saying that prison conditions in Hungary warranted an effective compensation system, as overcrowding is causing repeated and constant problems. The ECtHR called on Hungary to implement a prevention and compensation system to tackle the issue, she said.

Recent years have shown that the compensation system is vulnerable to abuse, she said.

So far, 12,680 rulings were issued in prison compensation cases, coming close to nine billion forints (EUR 26.6m), she said. Of the payments, merely 10 percent went towards paying damages to the victims of the inmates suing, and 61 percent ended up in attorneys’ deposit accounts, she added.

Under the new legislation, the claims of the victims will be met faster and more effectively, she said.

Fidesz lawmaker Gyula Budai said during the debate that the “prison business, an almost ten billion forint industry”, is an abuse of rights and harms the Hungarian state. It also harms public trust in the judiciary and goes against the “people’s sense of justice”, he said.