György Szöllősi, chief editor of the Hungarian sports daily Nemzeti Sport, had his visa application denied by the US Embassy in Hungary, despite the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’s official request for a diplomatic visa on his behalf.
Szöllősi was invited to give the keynote address at the 25th annual Árpád football (soccer) cup in Chicago, Illinois, organized by and for the Hungarian diaspora living in North America. Alas, he thus will not be able to fulfil his invitation.
Szöllősi is not only in charge of Hungary’s largest sports publication with a print circulation of over 25,000 copies and a website with over 500,000 monthly visitors, but he is also one of the vice presidents of the International Sports Press Association, holding the prestigious position since January 2019. He regularly participates in the vote to award football’s most coveted individual title, L’Équipe’s Ballon d’Or.
Yet he was deemed unfit to enter the United States on official business by the Embassy.
On his Facebook page, Szöllősi commented on this rather disquieting development as follows:
‘The US Embassy in Budapest has denied granting my visa, despite the official request from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This is especially perplexing given the fact that I was going to travel as a journalist and an official representative of Hungary, an ambassador.
It is not the personal insult that hurts—although it is quite heartbreaking that I have become “persona non grata” in the United States, and it would have been important for me to meet with my Hungarian friends and fellow sportsmen in America—rather,
it is the humiliation that was inflicted upon my country, its press deemed “undesirable”,
a representative of the media, and our sports journalists family by the United States, once the beacon for freedom of speech.
A country which, by the looks of it, is protecting its democracy from me, a sports journalist, while also making a—to put it mildly—embarrassing, Cold War-era-like decision regarding a citizen of one of its allies.’
The right-leaning newspaper Magyar Nemzet alleges that this was a call made by US Ambassador to Hungary David Pressman himself out of spite. Recently, the US State Department has made several other decisions that severely hurt US-Hungarian diplomatic relations, such as terminating the 1979 double taxation avoidance agreement between the two countries; or reducing the ESTA validity period for Hungarian citizens over dubious security concerns. The rejection of the visa application for Hungary’s most prominent sports journalist fits neatly into this pattern.
The Hungarian National Media Association (Magyar Nemzeti Médiaszövetség, MNMSZ) has released a public statement, officially condemning the decision.
Budapest Embassy Reacts
On Wednesday evening the US Embassy replied to a query by hvg.hu on the incident, stating that the United States only issues diplomatic visas to government officials, not to private individuals. The Embassy added that according to US laws, the Embassy cannot provide information on individual visa cases. The Embassy noted in addition that they have recently notified the Hungarian government that there has been a growing number of people who wish to travel to the United States with a diplomatic passport, although they are not officially affiliated with the government.
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