Hungarian police investigate modern slavery cases

Hungarian police have launched three new investigations in the past month alone into cases of slavery, Nepszabadsag daily said on Wednesday.

Modern slavery involves keeping vulnerable people in confinement and forcing to work without payment. It is a problem which appears to be growing in Hungary, the paper said.

"They made me work for nothing; I lived in a cellar and they used to beat me," a 50-year-old man who was rescued from a farm near Kisvarda in the north-east a few days ago, told the paper. "They told me they would kill me if I tried to escape."

In April, the police cracked down on a family in Kaposvar in the south-west, and arrested a couple and a third person who had kept three middle-aged men in slavery for years. The three were also victim to identity theft: they were forced to sign documents used for fraudulent business practices.

"It is easy to terrorise people on the edge of society, since they have nowhere to run … they will give up in the end and even feel satisfied with just having a shelter and some food," psychotherapist Gyorgy Virag, head of the National Criminology Institute, told the paper.

Often victims will not even try to run away even if they have a chance, he said. They generally refuse to testify against their keepers because they are so terrified, Virag added.

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