In Hungary the Office of History is responsible for archiving documents inherited after the former security service. The Office is a specialised public administration office which is financed from a separate budgetary unit within the state budget of Hungary. The Office does not deal with the lustration (screening) process.
The archives of the Office include documents of the former security apparatus as well as documents produced during the lustration processes. The Office is headed by the President and Vice President who are candidates of the Prime Minister approved of and nominated by the President of Hungary. Their term of office lasts 7 years.
The screening process in Hungary is conducted by independent courts on the basis of an act XXIII of 1994 on the screening of Holders of Some Important Positions, Holders of Position of Public Trust and Opinion-Leading Public Figures, and on the Office of History, adopted by the Parliament on June 12th, 2001.
Two other Hungarian institutions are worth mentioning: The Institute for the History of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution which is a successor of the Imre Nagy Institute of Sociology and Politics (operating in the period 1959-1963 in Brussels) and the Twentieth Century Institute which started functioning in May 1999 and is sponsored by the Public Endowment for the Research on the Eastern and Central European History and Society.
In July 2001, Dr. Maria Schmidt, Chief Advisor to Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban and the Director General of the Twentieth Century Institute visited the Institute of National Remembrance in Warsaw and met Professor Witold Kulesza, Vice-President of the Institute.
Representatives of the Institute of National Remembrance - Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation took part in a multilateral working meeting organised by the Office of History on March 6th and 7th, 2002 in Budapest. The meeting was devoted to the discussion of Central and Eastern European experience regarding the establishment and operation of the institutions dealing with archiving the documents of the former security apparatus and the lustration process.
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