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Tuesday, January 22, 2002

ROMANIAN BISHOP PLANS NEW LIBEL SUIT AGAINST AP
following news agency's acquittal over secret service story

By Stefan J. Bos
Eastern Europe Correspondent,
ASSIST News Service

BUDAPEST, HUNGARY  (ANS) -- A Protestant church leader, who played a crucial role in the 1989 Romanian revolution that toppled dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, says he will continue his legal battle against The Associated Press (AP) which accused him of having worked for the country's feared secret service "Securitate".

"I would like to inform you that we will continue the legal case against AP -even at (the European Court of Human Rights in) Strasbourg if necessary," Reformed Bishop Laszlo Tokes told ASSIST News Service in a statement on Tuesday, January 22.

Tokes lost a law suit initiated by him against the American news agency, after it was acquitted of libel and the Bucharest Tribunal overturned a fine for moral damages of about $22,000 in November.

MEDIA

Western observers seem to welcome the recent court ruling, after several attempts by officials in Romania to restrict the media in a country that has still little experience with an open society.

Although he admitted that the Securitate approached him during Communism, Tokes objected to alleged suggestions in an AP story of June 1998 that his acts were harmful to others. "I was forced to sign documents, but never volunteered to work for them," he told an ANS-reporter in an earlier interview.

But Romania's former President Emil Constantinescu has said the Bishop "knows more than he wants to share." Tokes strongly denied those charges, and stressed he was never very active for the Securitate.

INSTRUMENT

The organization was seen as an important instrument of the Ceausescu regime to spy on and oppress its opponents, as well as christians and minorities, including ethnic Hungarians.

Tokes, who received international awards, is regarded as an important voice of Romania's estimated two million ethnic Hungarians, who he believes still suffer under religious and other discrimination.

The Bishop has also expressed concern about "the return of former Communists" in the Romanian leadership, following recent local elections.

Award winning Journalist Stefan J. Bos was born on the 19th of September 1967 in a small home in downtown Amsterdam, in the Netherlands not far from the typewriter of his father, who was (and still is) a Reporter and ghostwriter. Already at a very young age Bos decided to become journalist and finally arrived in Hungary, the same country where his parents had smuggled Bibles during Communism.

Bos has traveled extensively to cover wars and revolutions throughout the region and received the Annual Press Award of Merit from the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs for his coverage about foreign policy affairs including Hungary's relationship with NATO and the European Union. Stefan J. Bos can be reached at: bosnews@externet.hu

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