Those who concentrate on the events of WWII and ignore the crimes committed during the socialist regime fail to understand the 20th-century history of Europe, Deputy Prime Minister Tibor Navracsics told public radio on Sunday.

Navracsics was interviewed by public Kossuth radio's morning programme before the European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism on August 23. The day will be marked by a conference in Parliament to be attended by justice ministers and experts from several EU member states.

While the affair of Hungarian war crime suspect Laszlo Csatary became a matter of global interest overnight, the international press remained silent about one-time communist interior minister Bela Biszku and Gyorgy Matsik, a prosecutor during the post-1956 retaliations, he said.

The approach to the five-pointed red star and the swastika is a good example of double standards, he said. While a Lithuanian sees them as symbols of oppression, deprivation of independence and concentration camps, a Spaniard or an Italian deeply condemns the swastika but sometimes considers the red star merely a fashion article, the deputy premier said.

The recent ruling of the Strasbourg court upholding the right to publicly display the red star reflects a similar approach, Navracsics said.

Motivated by an abstract European point of view, the Strasbourg judges gave preference to freedom of speech over the need to warn the public of past crimes, he said.

The European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism was first marked on the anniversary of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact last year under a Hungarian-Polish-Lithuanian initiative.

(MTI)