The greatest achievement of the Hungarian Chairmanship is that the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) succeeded in ensuring that the EU’s new data protection regulation should not unduly restrict access to documents related to the Holocaust, Szabolcs Takács, State Secretary for EU Affairs at the Prime Minister’s Office said on Wednesday in Brussels. Mr Takács supervised the work of IHRA’s Hungarian Chairmanship as a ministerial commissioner.
The inconceivable became reality in the middle of the 20th century when people in the millions had to live in fear and face the worst, something that the younger generations know increasingly less about, Mr Takács said. Therefore, in the past year, during the Hungarian IHRA Chairmanship, Hungary made every effort to foster the preservation of the saddest and most terrible memory of humanity and to combat forgetting. The Hungarian Chairmanship achieved that there is unlimited access to all archive documents for the purposes of Holocaust research, the State Secretary pointed out at the ceremony held at the Balassi Institute on the occasion of the closing of the Hungarian Chairmanship.
Hungary is committed to combatting every form of anti-Semitism and hatred without compromise, and also during the course of its Chairmanship it sought to preserve the memory of the Holocaust and to promote the cause of scientific research and education related to the Holocaust, Mr Takács stressed.
With the support of the Member Countries of IHRA, we succeeded in ensuring that under the EU’s new data protection regulation there is unlimited access to archive sources related to the Holocaust. The State Secretary believes that this is the greatest achievement of the operation of IHRA to date as the organisation managed to enforce its own criteria in another international organisation for the first time.
Mr Takács drew attention to the fact that a new form of anti-Semitism may be observed in a number of countries in Europe and in ever more places around the world. In this context, he highlighted the conference from among the programmes of the Hungarian IHRA Chairmanship which it organised, together with the international organisation’s Committee on Antisemitism and Holocaust Denial, on the topic of the Holocaust in common speech last autumn in Budapest.
Mr Takács said we need „zero tolerance” in relation to every form of Holocaust denial and hate speech, and to this end the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance must further raise awareness of its existence among the wider public, in particular, among young people. In his view, it is necessary to review the efficiency of the organisation in order for the educational principles of IHRA to shape the society of the present and the future.
Hungary handed over the Chairmanship of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) on Tuesday to Romania which will hold this office in the next 12 months. The handover ceremony was held in Berlin, at the headquarters of the Permanent Office of the international organisation.