Hungary's guardian of human rights - Parliamentary Commissioner on Human Rights Katalin Gonczol

Hungary's first Parliamentary Commissioner for Human Rights has issued a seating analysis of the 'uncivilized and intolerable' conditions prevailing at the country's overcrowded reception centres housing fugitives from war and tyranny in places like Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan. Three days later, the government announced the closure of the worst such institutions in the context of a big investment programme to improve the service.

A strike for justice? Far more. Dr. Katalin Gonczol, the Ombudsman, is assisting the birth of a climate of human rights in a society which simply lacks a tradition of democratically enforceable rule of law within living memory. Such a climate is essential for foreign investors as well as their local managers doing business in the region.

Hungary is a regional trend-setter. It recently joined Nato and may shortly enter the European Union. Its experiment in employing an eminent lawyer enabling ordinary citizens to talk back to their law makers and administrators and demand fair dealing marks an important stage in the evolution of human rights throughout formerly communist-dominated Europe.

Thus the Commissioner has emerged as a powerful agent of social reform and Dr. Gonczol loves it. A brilliant and very popular criminology professor at the Faculty of Law, Lorand Eotvos University in Budapest, she was appointed as Ombudsman in 1995.

Dr. Katalin Gonczol is a magnetic, early middle-age woman with a sensitive, mobile face, high cheekbones and widely set green eyes. She is secretary general of the Hungarian Society of Criminology (Paris). She has issued several groundbreaking new analyses on the human rights of population groups including the police, the young, the old and the disabled.

The Ombudsman is empowered with practically unrestricted access to official papers. Her job is to investigate, criticize and make recommendations for corrective action. She may propose to Parliament the amendment, repeal or issue of laws to protect the rights of a large community of citizens. She may turn to the Constitutional Court in case of disputes.

Or indeed she may investigate a decision by a local authority refusing a trading licence to a business. Or she may initiate a disciplinary inquiry against a policeman for the abuse of power if, say, he arrests a teenager who does not happen to carry a personal identification document even though it is available for inspection at his mother's flat upstairs.

She runs a department employing 25 lawyers and many outside specialists with the help of countless civic organizations. She receives up to 800 complaints a month from aggrieved citizens locked in various conflicts with authority, more than two thirds of which she cannot resolve.

'But even then,' she insists, 'we usually send them three-page replies explaining why we cannot help and who can and how they should be approached. I and my assistant personally supervise every inquiry and sign every letter.'

Yet Dr. Gonczol is not a workaholic. When I met her in Budapest for this 9 a.m. interview, she had just emerged from the gym. She is regularly seen in concert halls, swimming baths and theatres. She has many friends who say she is a great cook. She is easily approachable by her students as well as by journalists.

And she is very patient. She rewrites all her books and articles before publication at least three times. And even then they are carefully vetted by her husband, Professor Laszlo Valki, the international lawyer whose work she also regularly edits.

The two met as students 35 years ago. But the magic has never left their relationship despite their work in the same building just two floors apart and their daily lunch shared in the university canteen ever since. They still read and debate the same books, listen to the same music and rush home to each other after work. She admits to the odd 'Mediterranean row' between them - but says it is always resolved before the night is out. She told me, 'I was a child of divorced parents and would never have believed that such sustained romantic love is possible within marriage. But it is. And it is an enormous gift.'

Her father was a colourful man of broad Jewish culture and many loves and occupations - an author, tavern keeper and at one point a tram conductor in Budapest. Her mother's people had lost their wealth but enjoyed the support of the community of a solid Protestant town with fierce parochial loyalties, out in the great Hungarian plains. The contrast between the two worlds in which she found herself equally at home was to give her the insight into the complexity of society and the conflicts within it which has proved essential to meet the challenge of the Ombudsman's office.

'Through my paternal grandmother, she recalls, 'I became the honorary grandchild of a bunch of people who had survived deportation to Auschwitz during the Holocaust. They had been crammed by the Nazis into two waggons which somehow stayed behind when the rest of the train took off. I was the only grandchild any of them had. They met once a week for as long as they lived, and they spoiled me with their generous love. . .