Preparations for a Hungarian–Polish Intergovernmental Agreement on War Grave Care

According to the MoD press release, the draft was finalized in preparation for an agreement between the Government of Hungary and the Republic of Poland, which is scheduled to be signed in this autumn. The press release stresses that next year the world will remember the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of World War I, and this agreement is an important prerequisite for organizing several ceremonial events.

The MoD press release states that the long series of negotiations were interrupted by the Smolensk air disaster, in which the former secretary of the Polish Council for the Protection of Struggle and Martyrdom Sites also lost his life. The draft that has now been signed by his successor, A. K. Kunert, and Col. László Töll, the Head of the Ministry of Defence Public Relations and War Memorial Service Department is the result of a long preparatory process.

The scope of the agreement ranges from the war graves that serve as final resting places of many, often unknown, simple Hungarian soldiers to the care of memorial sites set up by the Hungarian and the Polish sides, often as a result of joint efforts, and includes the monuments and memorial plaques commemorating the fallen soldiers and civilian war victims.