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• Civil law dogmatic deficiencies and legislative hiatuses in a private law legislation: Short case study

  49-66

  Tibor Kiss

  Views:

  81

  Based on the Government Decree 383/2023 (VIII.14.) on the ministerial approval of lease contracts of companies directly or indirectly majority-owned by the state, the article presents a case study showing that the legislation suffers from numerous "legal errors" that violate the provisions of the Legislation Act and is not in line with the fundamental doctrinal principles of civil law. The case study describes in detail the provisions of Act CXXX of 2010 on Legislation that the Government Decree does not comply with and shows how imprecise wording leads to problems of interpretation. The paper points out the private law terminus technicus which the legislator did not apply correctly (the party of the lease contract, consideration, invalidity - ineffectiveness) and the author proposes to correct the errors and to clarify certain normative provisions.

• The special requirements applicable to the management of national assets, with a special respect to the requirement of transparency

  85-96.

  Zóra Zsófia Lehoczki

  Views:

  150

  The Fundamental Law of Hungary states that the property of the Hungarian State and of municipal governments shall be considered national assets. National assets shall be managed and protected for the purpose of serving the public interest, satisfying common needs and preserving natural resources, taking also into account the needs of future generations. Economic operators – such as companies - owned by the State or municipal governments shall conduct business prudently and independently, in accordance with the relevant legislation, under the requirements of legality, efficiency and effectiveness. The special requirements regarding the management and safeguarding are laid down in Act CXCVI of 2011 on National Assets (hereinafter: National Assets Act) and Act CVI of 2007 on State Property (hereinafter: State Property Act) also contains a few requirements in its preamble.

  Based on the above, national assets shall be managed and protected in a special way, compared to privately owned assets. Publicly owned enterprises play a very important role in the national economy, since they provide a significant amount of GDP, they employ numerous people, they usually provide public services and last but not least they manage public funds. As a consequence, these companies shall also manage their assets with respect to the special requirements. In our article, we introduce these requirements by examining their content and also their relationship towards each other.

  One of the most important requirements is transparency, since these enterprises manage public funds and according to the Fundamental Law, every organization managing public funds shall publicly account for the management of those funds. Public funds and national assets shall be managed according to the principles of transparency and of corruption-free public life. Data relating to public funds or to national assets shall be recognized as data of public interest. We lay a special emphasis on transparency by introducing the relating regulation and also by summarizing the most prominent statements of court decisions from the last few years. In their judgements the courts interpreted the requirement of transparency in connection with state-owned enterprises and the relationship between transparency and the protection of business secrets and business interests of the companies.

• The interaction of Continental and Anglo-Saxon legal system in the light of the FIDIC Yellow Book

  49-64

  Sándor Boros

  Views:

  49

  The so-called FIDIC Books made by the International Federation of Consulting Engineers provides different contract samples for construction projects, depending on the type of the project, with the primary aim of summarising best practice and proportionate risk-sharing. FIDIC Books are considered to be the most popular body of law worldwide in connection with construction projects. The Yellow Book is the second most commonly used contract sample, the essence of which is that the contractor’s obligation covers both planning and building. The Yellow Book applies the legal principles and legal institutions of the Anglo-Saxon legal system, which implies that the application of the contract sample in a continental legal context raises several problems regarding to interpretation and application. After an introduction to the interpretation of the Yellow Book in the continental legal context, the study deals with the question of the contractor's liability for damages arising from delay. The author focuses on cases where the delay of the contractor is caused by the principal. In this context, the author outlines a concrete proposal for the application of the law.

• Possibilities of workplace mediation in the European Union

  1-13.

  Aron Balogh

  Views:

  374

  The world of labor market and industrial relations is a field where conflicts and disputes are inevitable characteristics of the operation, regardless of the form of employment. Also, labor disputes appear both from an individual aspect, where the disputants are the employer and the employee, and in a collective respect, where the disputes take place between the employer(s) and the collective of the workers, typically represented by an employee organization (union) or a works council. 

  When a conflict or a dispute cannot be resolved through negotiation, the law offers dispute resolution mechanisms for the participants. Therefore, several legal mechanisms have been evolved in order to resolve disputes, starting from the classical form of litigation, where a court determines the end of the dispute by its judgement, and other alternative forms of dispute resolution, such as arbitration, mediation and conciliation, where the parties can reach a decision or a settlement outside of the judicial system of the state.

  EU Member States have introduced various legislative rules for labor dispute resolution covering all manner of individual and collective disputes. ADR schemes are also supported by the ILO, as the ILO Recommendation No. 92 (1951) suggests that voluntary conciliation should be made available to assist in the prevention and settlement of industrial disputes between employers and workers. Within the aegis of the European Union, several instruments have emerged with the attempt to elaborate the basic principles for the operation of ADR schemes in the context of cases between businesses and consumers. The Directive 2013/11/EU on alternative dispute resolution for consumer disputes (the “ADR Directive”) and Regulation (EU) No 524/2013 on online dispute resolution for consumer disputes (the “ODR Regulation”) ensured that consumers could turn to quality alternative dispute resolution entities for all kinds of contractual disputes with traders, and established an EU-wide online platform for consumer disputes that arise from online transactions with traders.

  Workplace mediation is widely and successfully utilized in the USA for solely employment purposes both in the private and the public sector. Also, in the United States is a “employment at will” doctrine prevails, that basically means – unless stipulated to the contrary by the parties – the employment relationship can be terminated with immediate effect without any justification (just cause), thus workers do not have access to legal remedies as in the EU where the statutory laws provide a broad protection against arbitrary or unjust termination. Mediation, however, provide an effective solution for employees and workers, even if situated outside the protective scope of labor law.

  While the role of customer/consumer ADR and mediation is increasing throughout the whole European Union, workplace and employment mediation still constitutes a “grey zone”.  In many of the legal instruments of the EU and also in several products of the national legislations, consumers and workers are treated with the same legal awareness, thus protective laws compensate their weaker position in their legal relationships, but as far as the utilization and access of dispute resolution schemes are concerned, a significant but not always reasonable differentiation can be detected. Also, while mediation is an available tool for individual employment matters, still has not been utilized considerably, and remained an instrument only to resolve mostly collective conflicts. Therefore, the aim of this paper to present various styles of mediations from a comparative perspective, to express their biggest advantages and to highlight the areas where mediation could be more suitable to use in the context of the individual disputes of the workplace.

• The impact of inflation on private law relationships

  45-72

  Tibor Kiss

  Views:

  204

  Not for decades have we seen price rises in Hungary, or in Europe and the world in general, such as those faced by the developed world in 2022. Inflation in Hungary was 24.5% in December 2022 and in January 2023, the indicator stood at 25.7%. This article provides a summary of the key concepts related to inflation, going beyond a definitional approach to inflation to cover its types and the most important principles and methods of measuring it. Economic foundations fundamentally determine private legal relations and legal institutions. In such a situation, crisis legislation is triggered, primarily in areas that have the greatest impact on the functioning of the economy and on consumers' daily lives. The present article reviews those important civil law structures and the rules governing them in the Civil Code and other statutory and governmental regulations, the content of which is justified to be amended in a persistent inflationary environment, but which have not been the focus of the legislator so far, emphasizing the need to adapt private law norms to the changed economic environment. The article examines those legal acts in which the legislator has set out in the text of the act data referring to value or price, nominally defining and quantifying in concrete terms the price or value that plays a significant role in a given private legal relationship. This type of legislation, however, does not take into account the changes in value relations at all, so that in an inflationary environment, the price and value figures nominally fixed in the private law norm are not adapted to economic processes, i.e. they are not in line with the current price level determined by economic fundamentals. The author outlines proposals and regulatory techniques for amending the law to adapt these legal provisions to the changed price and value conditions.

• The principles of property value and the appraised value in the system of the tax debt execution proceeding

  Péter Darai

  Views:

  199

  In my essay I’m trying to answer some questions in the topic of the appraisal of real property. During my work – in National Tax and Customs Administration of Hungary – I daily meet the problem that the process of appraisal is very complex activity because of many internal and external factors. It needs great attention because the appraised value influences the execution of movable and immovable property and determines the purchase price in compulsory auctions. With this in mind it effects on refundation of tax debt. It is important to note at the same time that the target of the execution is not the recovery of the debt at any cost; at least essential guaranteed procedures which protect the rights of the debtors. In the following lines I focus the operative legislation of the tax execution proceeding and I describe the concerning judicial precedent with particular attention te case law of the Supreme Court. The importance of the subject presented by some decisions of the Constitutional Court. In my opinion without exaggeration the theme is so interesting the recently changed legislation cannot be connected to it because in theory anyone can get into a life situation that execution proceeding so it is worth knowing some rules about it.