Ivan Korčok asks Hungarians to respect rules in education support

The head of Slovak diplomacy, Ivan Korčok, asked Hungary to respect the mutually agreed rules for the provision of subsidies in the field of education and culture, saying they should be in line with the agreement signed by both sides in 2004. Juraj Tomaga, a spokesman for the Slovak Foreign and European Affairs Ministry, says that since 2011 Hungary has unilaterally changed the way it disburses subsidies. Dennik N daily previously reported that Korčok had asked Budapest to route the education subsidies for ethnic Hungarians living in Slovakia through institutions and not pay them directly to individuals. The chair of the non-parliamentary ethnic-Hungarian Alliance party's Republican Council, Laszlo Solymos, shares this view. The Ministry of Education, however, does not have official information on the subsidies provided by Hungary to the citizens of the Slovak Republic. "If the financial subsidy were provided directly to schools and educational institutions, the subsidy could be used for the purpose of fulfilling the educational programmes of nationality schools. However, this applies to schools with legal personhood," specified the Ministry of Education. According to the Ministry, kindergartens and primary schools without legal personhood could only be involved in the direct financing of schools through their founders.