Part I — Situation overview

On 19 August 2026 those child protection inspection reports became public which the Ministry of the Interior ordered in the spring of 2024 and which the government thereafter did not publish for two years. The background: on 29 February 2024 Péter Csizi, the deputy state secretary of the Ministry of the Interior responsible for social affairs, instructed every government office to carry out an extraordinary inspection in the children’s homes; on 12 March 2024 Bence Rétvári, at the time the parliamentary state secretary of the portfolio, announced that the examination concerned 530 residential institutions for children and focused on the internal investigation of cases of abuse. The government announced the ordering of the inspections publicly — their results it did not. Only one government office, that of Nógrád county, published its inspection report on its website. On 2 September 2025 Direkt36 turned to the Ministry of the Interior with a public-interest data request; the portfolio sent formulaic summaries whose text was largely identical from one government office to the next. In the action brought with the help of the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union (TASZ) the Budapest-Capital Regional Court held at first instance on 16 December 2025 that the reports qualify as public-interest data; the Budapest-Capital Regional Court of Appeal upheld the decision with final effect on 30 April 2026. The documents were finally handed over on 31 July 2026 — three months after the final judgment, and already by the successor Ministry of Social Affairs and Family Affairs. The reports of Pest and Tolna counties have to this day not come to light.

The content of the reports is grave in several places. The most glaring case appears in the Bács-Kiskun county report: in a special children’s home, as the report records, “dinner at the central kitchen ends at 6:30 and thereafter no source of food (bread, butter, jam, etc.) is available for the children” — while, as the same document notes, the upbringing of the children cared for there is supplemented in part with sporting activity, so their need for nourishment is greater. The same report refers to a police investigation which “established that the abused children subjected themselves to the abusers in exchange for food”. On physical conditions the reports of several counties make grave findings as well: in Bács-Kiskun furniture posing a risk of accident and fractured floor covering, in Budapest an institution where on the floor of a large building two lamps out of twenty were lit, and where computers received as a donation were not used because of the obsolete electrical network; in residential homes in Vas county mouldy walls and leaking bathrooms, where twelve children shared a single usable bath — and where, according to the report, the condition “has deteriorated further since the previous inspection”. The report of Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg county records as a deficiency that may be called general that psychological support for the children concerned was omitted in almost every case, because there has been no psychologist for years. According to the Vas county document the number of sexual abuses between children rose compared with the previous year, and the youngest abuser was nine years old. Bence Rétvári did not respond to the enquiry; the Ministry of Social Affairs and Family Affairs indicated that specialised care had by 2026 become “practically completely blocked”, that it had put together a submission on new places and on settling crisis care, and that on 31 August it would publish the report closing the first part of the Child Protection Diagnosis.

MIAK’s reading: this case is not primarily about the conditions uncovered — although those in themselves call for immediate action — but about the fact that the monitoring function of the system worked, its consequence function did not. The reports were completed. The deficiencies were recorded. In some places it was also recorded that the deficiency had worsened since the previous inspection. That is, the official finding existed, but it received neither publicity nor enforcing power — the document remained inside the organisation for two years, and the child in residential care did not know about it, nor could turn to anybody. In every known pattern of institutional abuse the same four elements recur: a closed institution, a child in a position of dependence, an inspection without enforcing power, and a report that is not public. The character of the problem is therefore not moral but procedural — and precisely for that reason it can be fixed.

Part II — Foundations in the literature

The framework of principle for the topic comes together at three sources. The World Health Organization’s report European Health Report 2024 is directly relevant from two points of view: on the one hand it states that violence against children is among those areas on which timely data is systematically missing in the European region, on the other hand it summarises that the health consequences of maltreatment — mental, physical, sexual and reproductive — can be lifelong, and that they also affect academic performance, substance use and self-harm; these two findings together mean that publicity is not a moral question but a condition of public health data collection. Ivan Illich (Austrian-born social critic and philosopher, the classic author of the critique of institutionalised services) argues in his 1971 work Deschooling Society that every simple human need for which an institutional answer is found also creates a new category of poverty — this proposition gives the most precise description of principle for today’s case: the needs of a child taken into institutional care are transformed into an institutional allowance, and if the allowance runs dry, the child has no alternative source. The European Commission’s document The European Pillar of Social Rights Action Plan adds the measurement framework to this: its aim is to reduce the gap between children in need and children in a better position in access to key services, and to prevent a child living in a poor family from becoming an adult at risk of poverty. The detailed treatment of the literature — by author, with quotations — is to be found in the section 6.4 Literature in detail.

Part III — MIAK’s concrete proposal

MIAK proposes three measurable measures. All three target the structural fault now uncovered: the absence of publicity, of a measurable threshold and of a route of legal remedy.

3.1 Automatic publicity of child protection inspection reports (with a 30-day deadline, regulated by the fourth quarter of 2026)

MIAK proposes that legislation prescribe: every report prepared on an official child protection inspection is to be published by the body conducting it within 30 days of its closure, in anonymised form, in machine-readable format — automatically, without a data request. Anonymisation should extend to every identifiable item of data of the children and of the staff on duty, but should not extend to the name of the institution and the identification of the maintainer. This latter is one of the concrete deficiencies of the present case: the reports do not always name the institution, and therefore even today it cannot be known in which Bács-Kiskun county home the lack of food led to abuse — the public thus cannot follow whether the deficiency has been remedied. The proposal applies the logic of the A5 whistleblowing system and of the open data standard to specialised social care, and it builds on a concrete legal fact: the decision of the Budapest-Capital Regional Court of 16 December 2025 and then of the Budapest-Capital Regional Court of Appeal of 30 April 2026 already held that these reports are public-interest data. If judicial practice stands thus, then the litigation was two needlessly spent years — the aim of the rule is precisely that no judicial route should be needed for publicity.

3.2 A compulsory, numerical care minimum standard with inspection not announced in advance (by the first half of 2027)

The reports also show that inspection is at present predominantly descriptive in character: it records that the furniture is “a risk of accident”, the bathroom “mouldy”, the food “not available”. From these, however, no automatic measure follows, because there is nothing against which to measure them. MIAK proposes that the care minimum for specialised child protection care be put into numerical form: the number of daily meals and their distribution in time, the compulsory provision of a source of food available in the evening as well, the minimum number of working sanitary rooms per child, measurable requirements for lighting and indoor condition, and the availability of psychological care within a specified time following the uncovering of a case of abuse. Let the breach of the threshold be not a qualitative evaluation but an infringement of the law, with an obligation to act immediately. Let the inspection be, at least once a year, not announced in advance — a pre-announced inspection is structurally incapable of detecting a significant part of the deficiencies now uncovered. This is the implementation of the SZ7 dignity-based social policy programme point: the minimum level of care — food, washing, private life — is a fundamental-rights threshold, not the object of budgetary weighing. The logic of the SZ1 targeted support adds the resource side: the introduction of the minimum standard cannot be fulfilled alongside a shortage of places and of professionals, so its funding has to be planned at the same time as the threshold is promulgated.

3.3 Independent children’s-rights representation reachable outside the institution (by the first half of 2027)

The third proposal is the most important, because it is this that secures the operation of the other two as well. In the cases now uncovered the child had nobody to turn to: the abuse happened among those in care, the deficiency was caused by the operation of the institution, and the report was not public. MIAK proposes that for every child cared for in a residential institution for children there be a reachable children’s-rights representative who is not an employee of the institution and not of the maintainer, to whom the child may turn on a documented channel outside the institution, and who has an obligation to notify the authority. This is the direct application of the I6 programme point on lowering the threshold of citizens’ enforcement of rights to a group whose threshold of enforcement is the highest: a minor, in institutional care, without legal representation. Programme point SZ10 — the behavioural-science approach to the cognitive burden of poverty — warns that the formal possibility of reporting is not enough in itself: the channel has to be made familiar, simple and regular, because a person in crisis does not go looking for a procedural order.

The three proposals are bound together by a single principle: the operation of a closed institution can be corrected only by external feedback possessing enforcing power. Publicity creates the external attention, the numerical threshold the measurable infringement, and the independent representative the route of reporting. This follows from Illich’s argument (see 6.4.2): if the institution is the sole source of a need, then the fault of the institution is transformed directly into a lack of a basic need — and this can be detected only from outside the institution.

Part IV — Expected effects and risks

Dimension Expected effect Risk
Situation of the children The measurable care threshold and the external channel of representation together directly reduce vulnerability; psychological care after cases of abuse becomes compulsory The numerical threshold may turn into formal compliance: the institution fulfils the measurement points, the substantive quality of care does not improve
Social care system The public reports also quantify the extent of the shortage of places and of professionals, which makes development more plannable Publicity causes a reputational shock in the institutions in the short term, which may further increase the already high turnover
Public administration Automatic publication does away with the litigation route, and reduces the burden on the authorities and on the courts The obligation to publish may lead to a dilution of the content of the reports: the inspector formulates more cautiously if they know the text will be public
Healthcare Documented follow-up of cases of abuse makes it possible to measure and prevent the long-term health consequences The shortage of psychologists cannot be solved by legislation in the short term; the obligation remains unfulfillable without funding

The main dilemma stands between publicity and the substantive content of the reports. The documents that have now come out are valuable precisely because they were not intended for publicity: they contain concrete, uncomfortable, quantifiable findings. If publication becomes automatic, there is a danger that the style of the report takes refuge in generalities — just as the ministry’s first answer to the data request was a “formulaic summary whose text was largely identical from one government office to the next”, as the court too established. The protection against this is twofold: because of the numerical care threshold (3.2) the report has to answer to concrete measurement points, so the text cannot become entirely general; and independent representation (3.3) creates a second channel of information, outside the chain of inspection. The proposal tips over to the risk side if publicity is introduced but the threshold and the representation are not: in that case reports appearing annually and saying nothing will be born, and there will be no advance compared with the present situation.

Part V — Measurability and summary

5.1 What is worth following? (proposed KPIs)

MIAK proposes the following performance indicators (KPIs, Key Performance Indicators) for following — these are proposals, not government undertakings:

  • Publication rate and turnaround time: the proportion of closed child protection inspection reports published within 30 days — proposed target: 100 per cent. The starting value in the present case: 1 published report (Nógrád county) and a turnaround time longer than 24 months for the rest.
  • Fulfilment of the care threshold: the proportion of institutions where the inspection not announced in advance finds every numerical minimum requirement fulfilled. The aim of the first measurement is not a high value but the recording of the real starting point.
  • Availability of psychological care: the proportion of uncovered cases of abuse where the child received specialised care within a specified time — the present reports record this as omitted “in almost every case”.
  • Access to independent representation: the proportion of residential institutions where the children in care demonstrably reach a children’s-rights representative outside the institution, and the number of reports arriving on this channel.
  • The coming to light of the missing reports: whether the 2024 report of Pest and Tolna counties is available.

5.2 Summary

MIAK’s request in a single sentence: let the result of the next child protection inspection be public not by a judicial route but of itself — and let the two missing county reports come to light in the meantime. Of the Ministry of Social Affairs and Family Affairs MIAK asks that, alongside the summary promised for 31 August, it publish the numerical draft of the care minimum and the calculation of its funding; of Parliament, that it raise the obligation of publicity and independent children’s-rights representation to the level of legislation; and of the public, that it not read the story as the scandal of a single institution, because according to the testimony of the reports the deficiencies recur in fourteen counties.

Two MIAK foundational values are concerned, and both directly. Transparency because this case is the cleanest example that data publicity is not a principle for its own sake: for two years there existed an official finding that children are going hungry in an institution operating in state care — and the only reason this is known today is a journalistic data request and two court judgments. Had publicity been automatic, two years would have been available for correction. And universal representation because the child living in specialised child protection care is the social group with the fewest instruments for enforcing its own interests: it has no vote, it has no legal representation, and it cannot step out of the institution that cares for it. In MIAK’s system of values the representation of such a group is not a question of equity but the minimum condition of representation.

Part VI — Reasoning and further sources

6.1 The press framing by spectrum

On this day the source bands differed not in the facts but in the direction of responsibility and in the frames of the story.

The left-liberal band carried the investigative work and the content of the documents. Telex published Direkt36’s material, and its framing pointed unambiguously towards closure by those in power: according to the headline these are “concealed” reports, while the text leads in detail through the course of the public-interest data request and of the litigation — that is, the story is not only about the conditions but about the refusal of access. 444.hu, by contrast, put the sharpest statement of fact into the headline (abuse put up with in exchange for food), and emphasised the 2024 clemency affair as the triggering background — that is, the framing also asks about the political motivation of the measure.

The general public-affairs band chose a summarising, descriptive frame. 24.hu arranged the findings by county and closed with the ministry’s reaction: with the overload of the system and with the diagnosis promised for 31 August. This framing makes the capacity problem the explanation of the story, which is defensible in substance but pushes the question of closure into the background.

The pro-government and conservative band did not bring the topic into top focus on this day. On the front pages of Magyar Nemzet and Mandiner the MTI documentary material and the map of civil-society support were the leading domestic political topics; the child protection reports did not appear as a separate item. From MIAK’s point of view this is not a rhetorical remark but a substantive observation: a story attachable to the earlier government that ordered the inspections received no framing in the present opposition band, and the person who announced it at the time, Bence Rétvári, did not respond to Direkt36’s enquiry. MIAK does not regard the missing reaction as a position — but it records that the automatic publicity under proposal 3.1 protects precisely in such situations, because it does not make the facts dependent on a political actor’s willingness to make a statement.

6.2 Facts and data

Datum Value Source
The ordering of the inspection 29 February 2024 (instruction of the deputy state secretary for home affairs) Direkt36–Telex, 19 August 2026
Public announcement of the inspection 12 March 2024 Direkt36–Telex, 19 August 2026
Residential institutions for children concerned 530 Direkt36–Telex, 444.hu, 19 August 2026
Number of government offices that published their report 1 (Nógrád county) Direkt36–Telex, 19 August 2026
Submission of the public-interest data request 2 September 2025 Direkt36–Telex, 19 August 2026
First-instance judgment (Budapest-Capital Regional Court) 16 December 2025 Direkt36–Telex, 19 August 2026
Final second-instance judgment (Budapest-Capital Regional Court of Appeal) 30 April 2026 Direkt36–Telex, 19 August 2026
Actual handover of the reports 31 July 2026 Direkt36–Telex, 19 August 2026
Missing county reports 2 (Pest, Tolna) Direkt36–Telex, 19 August 2026
Age of the youngest abuser (Vas county report) 9 years Direkt36–Telex, 444.hu, 19 August 2026
Number of children per usable bathroom (residential home in Vas county) 12 Direkt36–Telex, 19 August 2026
Proportion of working lamps on the floor of a Budapest home 2 out of 20 Direkt36–Telex, 24.hu, 19 August 2026
End of the last daily meal in the Bács-Kiskun county special home 18:30 Direkt36–Telex, 19 August 2026
Publication of the first part of the promised Child Protection Diagnosis 31 August 2026 Ministry of Social Affairs and Family Affairs, 19 August 2026

6.3 Policy dimensions

  • Social policy (programme points and background material) — the situation of places and professionals in specialised child protection care, and the definition of the care minimum as a fundamental-rights threshold (programme point ID: SZ1, SZ7, SZ10).
  • Justice (programme points) — lowering the threshold of the enforcement of rights for the group where it is highest: a minor, in institutional care, without legal representation (programme point ID: I6).
  • Transparency and anti-corruption policy (programme points) — the protection of reports by carers and staff, and the publication of inspection reports as open data (programme point ID: A5).
  • Healthcare (background material) — the long-term health consequences of childhood maltreatment and the availability of specialised psychological care in institutional provision.

A clarification of competences that is necessary in the treatment of the topic: official child protection inspection is conducted by the government offices as authorities, responsibility for the sectoral regulation lies in 2026 with the Ministry of Social Affairs and Family Affairs as the successor of the Ministry of the Interior, and in cases of abuse the police investigate — three different competences, with three different procedural orders. The adjudication of the public-interest data request and the question of publicity form the fourth, separate band, in which the court decided. The lesson of the present case is precisely that there was no automatic transfer of information between the four bands.

6.4 Literature in detail

6.4.1 World Health Organization: European Health Report 2024

Two findings of the report connect directly to today’s case. The first is about the absence of data: among those areas on which there is systematically no timely data in the European region, the document expressly names violence against children — alongside child development, mental health and non-fatal injuries. This observation is the public health reason behind proposal 3.1: if the data of an official inspection does not become public and cannot be aggregated, then the deficiency is not only one of legal remedy but also statistical — the size of the phenomenon cannot be known. The second finding is about the consequences: according to the report violence against children can cause long-term health problems, including injuries, disability, gastrointestinal illnesses, and it is connected with substance use, self-harm and risk-taking behaviour; maltreatment also affects academic performance. In the light of the Hungarian reports this means that the deficiency recorded in the Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg county document — the omitted psychological support — is not the omission of a supplementary service but a direct factor in making the harm lasting. From here follows the part of proposal 3.2 which prescribes psychological care as an obligation within a specified time.

📖 Source: World Health Organization: European Health Report 2024

6.4.2 Ivan Illich: Deschooling Society

The central proposition of Illich’s book is about the self-reinforcing logic of institutionalisation. Writing on the modernisation of poverty he puts it thus:

“Every simple need to which an institutional answer is found permits the invention of a new class of poor and a new definition of poverty.”

According to Illich’s argument the institution not only satisfies the need but also monopolises the manner of its satisfaction — so the informal, community solutions outside the institution are dismantled, and the person cared for falls into complete dependence. Applied to specialised child protection care this gives the most precise description of today’s case. For a child living in a home, eating is not one possibility among several but the sole source: if the central kitchen closes at half past six and there is no bread afterwards, then there is no alternative — no shop, no family, no income of one’s own. The mechanism described in the Bács-Kiskun county report, in which the children subjected themselves to the abusers in exchange for food, follows precisely from this monopoly position: where the institution is the sole source, there the running dry of the source immediately produces the gravest vulnerability. Illich’s conclusion — that the institutional answer always has to be supplemented with feedback from outside the institution — is directly the reason behind proposal 3.3, independent children’s-rights representation.

📖 Source: Ivan Illich: Deschooling Society

6.4.3 European Commission: The European Pillar of Social Rights Action Plan

The document is the implementing framework of the European Pillar of Social Rights, and with regard to children it formulates a separate aim: to reduce the gap between children in need and children in a better position in access to key services, to create equal opportunities for every child, and to prevent children living in poor families from becoming adults at risk of poverty — all this with targeted national measures and investments. The numerical background of the action plan is telling as well: according to the data it communicates, in 2019 about 91 million people in the Union lived at risk of poverty or social exclusion, of them 17.9 million from the 0–17 age group. From the point of view of the Hungarian case the role of the action plan is that it gives the measurement framework: the numerical care minimum under MIAK’s proposal 3.2 is not a domestic innovation but the application of the EU measurement logic to the group to which the gap in access applies most sharply. In the case of a child living in specialised care, “access to a key service” is not an abstract indicator: it means whether there is bread in the evening, whether the bath works, and whether there is a psychologist.

📖 Source: European Commission: The European Pillar of Social Rights Action Plan

6.5 International comparison

The Illichian requirement of “feedback from outside the institution” has been institutionalised in several European systems. In numerous member states the inspection of residential institutions for children is carried out by a supervisory body organisationally separated from the maintainer, whose reports are public by default and identifiable at the level of the institution — so the remedying of the deficiency can be followed afterwards. The institution of the children’s-rights ombudsman, or of the children’s-rights representative, creates the same logic from the side of the child: it is not the system that monitors itself, but the person cared for who receives a direct channel outside the institution. The national action plans of the European Child Guarantee expressly link these two elements — the measurable threshold of access and the route of enforcement of rights — so MIAK’s proposals 3.1–3.3 are not a unique construction but the domestic application of an existing EU policy structure. The most important international experience, however, is about sequence: in those systems where publicity was introduced without the measurable threshold and independent representation, the reports softened into generalities within a few years — this is the concrete risk of postponing proposals 3.2 and 3.3.

Social policy

  • SZ1 — Targeted support
  • SZ7 — “Dignity-based” social policy
  • SZ10 — The cognitive burden of poverty — behavioural-science social policy

Justice

  • I6 — Lowering the threshold of citizens’ enforcement of rights

Transparency and anti-corruption policy

  • A5 — Whistleblowing system

Proposed new programme point: Automatic publicity of child protection inspection reports and a numerical care minimum — for the Social policy area.

6.7 List of sources

Press sources (MIAK press monitor, 19 August 2026 — topic 3):

Knowledge base references (specialist books and official documents):

  • 📖 World Health Organization: European Health Report 2024
  • 📖 Ivan Illich: Deschooling Society
  • 📖 European Commission: The European Pillar of Social Rights Action Plan

MIAK internal materials:

  • MIAK policy area: Social policy (background material and programme points; programme point ID: SZ1, SZ7, SZ10)
  • MIAK policy area: Justice (programme points; programme point ID: I6)
  • MIAK policy area: Transparency and anti-corruption policy (programme points; programme point ID: A5)
  • MIAK press monitor, 19 August 2026 — topic 3, score: 89/100

Supplementary public data sources:

  • European Child Guarantee — national action plans and evaluation reports
  • Children’s-rights project reports of the Commissioner for Fundamental Rights
  • Hungarian Central Statistical Office (KSH) — social care system statistics
  • UNICEF Innocenti research reports on child well-being

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