Why is Brussels ignoring Fico's ethnic land seizures in Slovakia?

Slovakia has now crossed a legal and moral threshold: criticism of ethnically-based land confiscations has become a criminal offence.

On 23 December, Slovak president Peter Pellegrini signed amendments to the criminal code, adopted by the Slovak parliament on 11 December, that make it punishable — by up to six months in prison — to publicly question the post-war settlement, including the Beneš decrees.

With the president declining to raise constitutional objections, the amendments have entered into force.

The amendment follows a wave of protests. Thousands demonstrated in Bratislava on 16 December against the criminal code overhaul, and on 20 December members of Slovakia’s Hungarian minority organised a separate protest opposing the state’s ongoing use of wartime decrees to confiscate private land on ethnic grounds. 

Slovakia has thus criminalised criticism not only of history, but of a contemporary state practice through which people are losing property simply because their grandparents — from whom they inherited the land — were classified as belonging to the 'wrong' ethnicity.

The amendment shields an active confiscation mechanism rooted in post-war measures that remain operative in Slovak law and administration, reinforcing a nationalist political narrative while silencing dissent.

To understand the significance of this shift, one must look at what is happening on the ground.

Post-WWII settlement

Imagine discovering that land your family has legally owned and farmed for generations has suddenly been registered to the state — not because of any recent wrongdoing, but because of an archival document from 1945 declaring a long-deceased ancestor to be of German or Hungarian ethnicity.

This is not historical fiction.

It is happening in Slovakia today. In late November, the government defended the practice through a resolution portraying the Beneš decrees as “untouchable,” and has taken steps to silence anyone who questions their contemporary application.

The root of the problem lies in the post-World War II Beneš decrees, which stripped Germans and Hungarians in Czechoslovakia of rights, citizenship and property on the basis of collective guilt.

For decades, Slovak governments claimed these measures were obsolete. That narrative collapsed in 2020, when the European court of human rights confirmed in Bosits v. Slovakia that the decrees are still being used in present-day property proceedings.

This legal afterlife exists because many post-war confiscations were never formally finalised.

Confiscation orders were issued but never entered into land registries due to procedural errors. Families therefore remained legal owners and passed the land on through inheritance for decades.

Today, the state treats these unfinished cases as administrative mistakes to be corrected, retroactively registering itself as owner — without compensation and often without proper notice.

This is not a handful of isolated cases but a systematic, state-run practice. Since 2018, the Slovak Land Fund has been seizing property under a 1945 ordinance, often without informing owners. Victims include ethnic Hungarians, Slovaks with Hungarian or German roots, and Austrian or Hungarian citizens whose ancestors were expelled after the war.

According to documents obtained by the Hungarian Alliance — political party representing Slovakia’s Hungarian minority — through freedom-of-information requests, more than 1,000 hectares of land were confiscated between 2019 and 2025, mostly in southern Slovakia.

The practice is accelerating, with independent reporting confirming an upsurge in seizures in 2025.

Conveniently located near major infrastructure?

Although the government provides no official valuations, many of the affected plots lie near major transport routes and infrastructure around Bratislava, amounting to assets worth hundreds of millions of euros.

For years, members of Slovakia’s Hungarian minority warned about these practices, only to be accused of undermining the post-war settlement.

The political landscape shifted when Progressive Slovakia, the leading opposition party, recently called the confiscations a violation of human dignity and urged authorities to stop applying the decrees.

The government responded by escalating the issue.

Prime minister Robert Fico’s cabinet adopted a formal resolution declaring the Beneš decrees an “untouchable, closed chapter,” clearly intended to legitimise ongoing confiscations.

It then went further.

Criminal liability — including imprisonment — was introduced for anyone who publicly “denies” the post-war settlement, explicitly including the ordinances underpinning today’s confiscations.

The mass protest in Bratislava days later showed that the issue has moved beyond minority-rights advocacy into a wider debate about abuse of power and corruption.

Beyond intimidating critics and deterring victims from speaking out, the amendment represents a direct assault on freedom of expression. 

Publicly questioning ethnically based confiscations now carries the risk of criminal punishment.

The implications extend beyond Slovakia.

Enforcing collective punishment through wartime decrees, retroactively stripping property without compensation, and criminalising criticism of these practices is incompatible with the rule of law.

The European Union cannot credibly claim to defend equality before the law and fundamental rights while tolerating such measures within a member state.

The EU must confront the issue openly within its rule-of-law framework. In a modern European democracy, collective guilt cannot serve as land policy — and speaking about it must never be treated as a crime.

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