Policy and Methods
While the security apparatus were operating, they supported the Hungarian Working People's Party (MDP) directly, with little reference made to Government norms. This support was primarily through the secret gathering of intelligence, primarily through a vast network of informants, like the system used by the Ministry for State Security (Stasi) in the German Democratic Republic.
The investigation network was supplemented with a mechanism of secret arrests, followed by extensive periods of torture (lasting between 3 and 18 months). When the apparatus had extracted confessions of varying quality from a prisoner, the State's system of public procurators and courts would be called in, in order to make a ruling on the sentence. This was the norm of operation for the ÁVH, and was only diverged from in matters of utmost state security; for example, the illegal arrest and indefinite solitary detention of the Communist Party of Great Britain operative Edith Bone. Despite the forced nature of confessions, retractions at trial were not considered a danger to the process, due to the obvious threat of continued torture during a recess of the trial.
Read more about this topic: State Protection Authority
Famous quotes containing the words policy and/or methods:
“While I am in favor of the Government promptly enforcing the laws for the present, defending the forts and collecting the revenue, I am not in favor of a war policy with a view to the conquest of any of the slave States; except such as are needed to give us a good boundary. If Maryland attempts to go off, suppress her in order to save the Potomac and the District of Columbia. Cut a piece off of western Virginia and keep Missouri and all the Territories.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“I believe in women; and in their right to their own best possibilities in every department of life. I believe that the methods of dress practiced among women are a marked hindrance to the realization of these possibilities, and should be scorned or persuaded out of society.”
—Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911)