A Hungarian court has ordered an article on the far-right website Kuruc.info to be deleted, it emerged on Wednesday evening. The court order to block the holocaust denying article is the first time Hungarian courts have taken action to make an Internet content unavailable since the government criminalised the denial of crimes committed by totalitarian systems.
The article in question was published by the far-right news website Kuruc.info in June 2013. The piece questions the atrocities that took place against Jews in the Auschwitz, claiming “such things never ever happened”. Following its appearance on the site, a police investigation was launched due to the public denial of crimes committed by National Socialist or Communist systems; however, police were unable to locate the author or the person responsible for publishing the article. Following this, the Budapest Chief Prosecutor’s Office asked the court to order the article to be blocked.
A spokesman for the Metropolitan Court of Justice told Kossuth Rádió that the court has provided one working day to the US-based website’s host to make the article permanently unavailable or to delete it from its database.
The case is the first occasion a Hungarian court has ordered an Internet content to be blocked. If the US host will not act according to the court decision, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs will have the opportunity to request legal aid from US authorities. If this is to no avail, the National Media and Telecommunications Authority will order each of Hungary’s Internet providers to block the holocaust denying article, the public radio station reported.
