115
minister, sentenced in July 1974 to 2 years' imprisonment for having received and distributed bibles and religious literature from abroad outside official chan- nels, and Zoltán Kallós, an outstanding folklorist and musicologist of Hungarian extraction, who was sentenced in December 1974 to 21⁄2 years imprisonment for alleged homosexual connections. It seems probable that an important factor in the decision to prosecute Kallós was his untiring work collecting Hungarian folk ballads on the territory of Romania.
Most of Al's cases are members of the German minority sentenced for trying to leave the country illegally after being refused emigration passports by the authorities. Unconfirmed information also reached AI about excessively harsh prison conditions under which at least 13 members of the Seventh Day Adventist Church are suffering. The same source reports that a court in the northern Romanian town of Viseul sentenced seven couples to 3 years' imprison- ment and deprived them of custody of their children because the parents had insisted that the children should be given religious education.
On 28 October 1974 the Socialist Republic of Romania ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Following an AI appeal to President Nicolae Ceausescu to commute the death sentence on Richard Szattinger, a Romanian citizen, the Romanian ambassador in London was instruc-
Reprinted by permission of the Dutch artist Fritz Behrendt.