History/Political Science paper by Murber, Ibolya
Az 1956-os forradalom után szülő nélkül menekülő kis- és fiatalkorúak története (Accepted)
Type of Abstract (select):Abstract (max. 250 words):
My lecture deals with a rather neglected aspect of international migration: it is about those young people and children who left Hungary in 1956 without parents. They were under 18 when they crossed the Austrian and Yugoslav borders. Their number was about 10-13,000 people, which made up more than 5% of the approximately 200,000 refugees from Hungary. This lecture compares how these young people were treated in Austria and Yugoslavia: how they were housed, how they received education, how they were able to travel to other host countries or return to Hungary. The different handling of the Austrian and Yugoslav authorities depended mainly on their interstate relations with Hungary and on the ratification of the Geneva Refugee Convention. The Yugoslav-Hungarian cooperation on repatriation worked better. This is reflected in the high number of young people returning to Hungary (15-20%). Cooperation with Austria was not without problems. The Austrian authorities played for time. According to the Austrian interpretation of law, young people from the age of 18 were allowed to decide on their future home country alone, without their parents. As a result, only about 8% of young people returned to Hungary.
Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Dr. habil. Ibolya Murber is Associate Professor at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE BDPK) in Budapest/ Szombathely She earned her Ph.D. from ELTE in 2005, and completed her habilitation at ELTE in 2013. Between 2001 and 2004 she served as an archivist at the Hungarian National Archives in Budapest, and between 2007 and 2016 was a faculty member at the University of West Hungary in Sopron. She has been a visiting professor at the University of Vienna and Saarland University, in 2019–1920 held an OeAD Richard Plaschka Fellowship in Vienna, and in 2021–2024 holds a János Bolyai Fellowship of Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Her research focuses on twentieth-century history, and is centered primarily on diplomacy and international relations, Central European migration, and Austro-Hungarian relations.