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Right to a Healthy Environment in the Theory
24-38Views:408To protect the environment with the help of human rights is one possible way among others to fight against environmental degradation. Yet, does this idea fit into the system of human rights, taking into consideration the fact that the upmost goal of human rights is the protection of human dignity? Is the connection between the environment and the human dignity strong enough to protect the environment by human rights? The following conceptual paper searches for reasonable answers to these questions by analyzing the so-called right to a healthy environment. By doing so the links between human and environmental rights and the specialties of human rights will be examined in order to show why the right to a healthy environment could in theory fit into the system of human rights protection.
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The Concept of the Right to Food in Public International Law
86-99Views:355According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), at least 868 million people are undernourished nowadays. Combating against hunger and malnutrition shall not only be a moral duty, but a legally binding human rights obligation. The right to food is recognized firstly within the text of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted in 1948, as part of the right to an adequate standard of living, however nowadays it is considered to be a substantive right. This study deals with the key aspects of the right to adequate food in public international law, including its definition, content and enforcement, as well.
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Sustainability in Copyright Law
40-61Views:356The aim of the paper is to give an overview of the pathfinding process of the copyright law, and of the European and Hungarian endeavors in favour of the sustainability of the copyright law via the copyright specific aspects of sustainability. It then aims to summarize the achievements of the harmonization process and draw attention to the goals to be achieved. The topic is approached from a cultural economic perspective. The main topic is described via historical and current aspects of the balance search of copyright law. the paper reviews the background of the development and current situation of copyright law from the point of view of philosophy and fundamental rights. With the analysis of the dynamism of economic and moral rights the paper outlines the necessity of parallelism of the two parts of copyright law. The examination of competitiveness of copyright law tends to highlight the inseparability of competitiveness and sustainability and emphasizes their development as being interlinked.
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Some Legal Challenges of Digital Inheritance with Special Regard to Privacy
84-98Views:591Digital inheritance, because of its complexity, cannot be considered uniformly. The elements of digital inheritance which can be considered as property are regulated by the law of succession. The personal elements of the digital inheritance are regulated by the right in memoriam and data protection laws. In the current Hungarian legal system the amendment of Act no. CXII of 2011 on the Right of Informational Self-Determination put the post-mortem privacy principle into regulatory form, in addition to the right to respect for the deceased which provides legal protection against violation of the memory of a deceased person.
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Central Issues of the Application of EU Law in the Recent Case Law of the Hungarian Constitutional Court
161-174Views:264The present article examines the recent case law of the Hungarian Constitutional Court as regards the constitutional framework and the judicial practice of the application of EU law. After a short overview of the early precedents, the article focuses on the case law subsequent to the adoption of the new Fundamental Law in 2012. In the recent decisions the need for cooperation with the EU Court of Justice is of special importance so the article reflects on this issue as well. The first part scrutinizes the case law concerning the constitutional limitations and control measures of the application of EU law, including the landmark decision of 22/2016 (XII. 5.). The second part focuses on the decisions delivered in constitutional complaint proceedings, which determine the constitutional requirements of the preliminary rulings procedure and the judicial obligation to give a reasoned decision.
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The Right to Maintain Contact within the Context of Fundamental and Personality Rights
Views:946It is self-evident that parents play an irreplaceable role in the lives of their children, influencing the child's physical, mental, and emotional well-being and behavior. It is therefore necessary that children maintain personal relations and direct contact with each parent, even if the marriage of his/her parents is permanently and irreparably damaged. The right to contact, which has a strong legal foundation in international conventions, is traditionally described as a right of the child, despite the fact that contact between parent and child is both a right and obligation of mothers, fathers and children. The right to contact is a Janus-faced, complex legal institution: although it is largely based on the fundamental right to private and family life guaranteed by constitutional norms, it plays a significant role in private law disputes as well. The aim of this article is to present the place of the right to contact within the Hungarian legal regime, emphasizing the enforcement of this right in the field of protection of basic and personality rights.
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Social Dumping in the Face of Cross-border Collective Agreements and Actions: A Dilemma of the European Legal Practice on the Edge of Law and Economy in the Light of the Framework of International Standards
180-202Views:357In this paper I outline the objectives of the ILO, the conventions relevant to collective bargaining and action, and furthermore the pronouncements of the ILO supervisory bodies. After describing social dumping I examine the jurisprudence of the European Union regarding the collision of fundamental freedoms and collective labour rights in the light of international labour standards. My observation is that the hierarchical relationship between fundamental freedoms and labour rights in favour of the former cannot be maintained even based on EU law.
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The One Who Wanted Online Courts Before the Coronavirus: Review of Richard Susskind's New Book "Online Courts and the Future of Justice"
192-200Views:483In November 2019 Richard Susskind, who is relatively known and popular in Hungary as well, published his new book “Online courts and the future of justice” issued by Oxford University Press. The author argued rather radically for the necessity of the change of legal services in his previous books before and he has maintained this approach. This time Susskind argues for the transformation of the century-old court systems giving alternative ideas about what sort of methods and ways in which we should transform our courts in order to make judicial services available for every person indeed. As the title suggests, the core concept of the book is the realization of online courts, which has slowly become a reality amid the pandemic caused by the coronavirus. Thus, the concept of Susskind may be called even fatidical from this perspective.
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Additional Remarks on the Question of Civil Service Law as a Branch of Law
120-133Views:720The study focuses on the relationship between civil service law and labour law. In Hungary, there have been significant changes in the last decade regarding the regulation of civil service law. The types of the civil service legal relationships have increased, the forums and procedural rules for adjudicating civil service law related disputes have changed, and the number of public employees providing public services has rapidly decreased. This is of particular importance because the existence of these branches of the law is determined by legislation as well. The study concludes that the ability of civil service law to become an independent branch of law will be determined not by 'internal' developments but by legislative ambitions.
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From Accusation to Proof: The Right to a Fair Trial in the Light of Digital Evidence
Views:28The aim of this study is to examine whether digital evidence, which plays an increasingly prominent role in criminal proceedings, complies with one of the most fundamental constitutional guarantees of the administration of justice: the right to a fair trial. More specifically, the study seeks to determine whether, within the framework of the evidentiary process, the accused and the defence are given a genuine opportunity to obtain full access to and examine evidence in digital form in a manner that ensures that the right to a fair trial is not infringed. To this end, I shall first outline the concept of electronic data as a newly applied means of evidence in Hungarian procedural law. I shall then discuss the substance of the right to a fair trial and the origins of this fundamental principle, before comparing these with the specific characteristics of digital evidence and the rules of evidence. Throughout this work, where relevant, I have also cited court rulings from both Hungary and other jurisdictions, drawing primarily on decisions of the European Court of Human Rights. Upon completion of my work, I will summarise the points made and provide an answer to the question posed above.
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The right to take collective action in EU law based on the European Pillar of Social Rights and the recent case law of the CJEU
9-24Views:440This paper is built around the workers’ fundamental right to take collective action and collective bargaining. Although, this right is firmly embedded in the majority of labour law systems in the social policy (meaning labour law, too) of the European Union, it is worth analysing it separately with an independent meaning. We can approach this right from the fundamental rights, the fundamental treaties or from certain directives, so we can find several questions that are difficult to answer properly. These problems are mostly catalysed by the necessary collision between the need for socially motivated legal protection and the fundamental economic freedoms. In my research, I analyse this right – along with some other connected ones – with the help of the recent case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union and the European Pillar of Social Rights because the latter highlights the holistic approach in the current reforms of EU social policy.
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Impact of EU Law on National Criminal Law
79-93Views:232This paper aims to analyse the main linking points between EU law and national criminal law. For a long time, the criminal laws of the Member States have been heavily affected by EU law. This influence can be either negative or positive. The most lenient form of the positive effect is the assimilation principle, which does not seek to incorporate EU norms into national criminal law, only attempts to extend the latter’s applicability to the protection of the interests of the European Union. In the case of legal harmonization the Member States are required to adopt common criminal norms which aim to reduce the differences of the national criminal law systems. The most serious impact on national penal law is the supranational criminal legislation, which results not only in the approximation but the unification of the criminal laws of the Member States.
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Artificial Intelligence from the Viewpoint of Civil Law
28-41Views:1666The aim of this paper to examine the definition of artificial intelligence and how AI can be considered in the field of civil law. The topic is being studied by many authors around the world and they are urging the initiation of legislation. The reason is that technology is rapidly developing, but the legislation cannot cope with this. However, in order to protect individuals, it is important to have a legal assessment of artificial intelligence. As a first step, it might be helpful to define the technology from the viewpoint of civil law.
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The role of lien holder in the judicial execution procedure
139-158Views:376Lien is substantially characterized by priority in satisfaction, which is in the spotlight of the execution of the lien. The lien’s function and force as a security interest is determined by the rules of execution. Under Act V of 2013 on the Civil Code, out-of-court execution has become the main rule, however, judicial execution and liquidation proceedings remained available to enforce the lien. Furthermore, in order to protect the purpose of the pledge to serve as a collateral and to provide priority in satisfaction, the lien may also be enforced where the pledge has been seized and offered for sale in the execution proceedings initiated by a person other than the lien holder. In this case, the lien holder may join in the execution proceedings even if his/ her claim against the lienee as debtor is not yet due. otherwise, upon auctioning the pledge, the lien holder’s lien would terminate. The purpose of this study is to identify and address the issues of this specific type of execution that arise during implementation as well as the incompleteness of the applicable laws and regulations.
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The Indigenous Peoples’ Right to Cultural Identity in the Case-law of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights
145-163Views:423The present paper examines the protection of cultural identity in the case-law of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR), where this question has primarily been dealt with in connection with the rights of indigenous peoples. Although not expressly guaranteed in the American Convention on Human Rights (ACHR), the right to cultural identity is found to be protected in the treaty due to the IACHR’s evolutionary interpretation of the right to life and the right to property, as well as other first-generation human rights contained in the ACHR. Issued in the Spring of 2020, the IACHR decision in the case Lhaka Honhat vs Argentina puts into a new perspective the protection of the right to cultural identity. Unlike before, it was clearly established that cultural rights are autonomous and judicially enforceable under Article 26 of the ACHR. At the same time, the ICHR’s revolutionary approach provides new opportunities for the judicial protection of environmental rights claims based on Article 26 of the ACHR as well.
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Social Psychology of Law
158-162Views:386Book review on the book Hunyady György–Berkics Mihály (szerk.): A jog szociálpszichológiája – A hiányzó láncszem. ELTE Eötvös Kiadó, Budapest, 2015.
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A Philosophical Approach to Law
11-22Views:283Bjarne Melkevik’s book is one of the best comprehensive treatments of legal philosophy currently available in Canada. First of all, the reader will find in the form of a long introduction a bookchapter translated into Hungarian, which is a general description of Melkevik’s jurisprudential views, provided by Mate Paksy. The chosen chapter organizes the reflexions on legal philosophy into three interrelated ques- tions. Melkevik’s first, thought-provoking question is as follows: why do we need legal philosophy? He views legal philosophy not as foundational legal scholarship, but mainly as an elucidation of public, reflexive argumentation on law which isn’t at
odds either with an empirical methodology. The second question concerns whether studying legal philosophy is useful for lawyers. Here Melkevik endorses again a post-positivist position according to which both law and legal philosophy are essentially practical discourses. Though the third part of the paper is heavy with disciplinary boundary-drawing, which emerges from questioning the place of legal scholarship vis-à-vis other, more empirical branches of social sciences such as history or anthropology, Melkevik’s reflexions here are still inspired by a sort of Neo-Kantian legal philosophy and Habermas’ communicative ethics.
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Possible improvements of the water law concepts
38-54Views:288The present article concentrates on the so-called water law concepts. As regards water law concepts, the article especially deals with the challenges of the Hungarian water management. The article has five main chapters. In the first chapter, the author focuses on the basis of the water law concepts, namely on natural, social and engineering sciences, furthermore, the author also determines the legal instruments which are able to provide proper links among the different water law concepts. The further four chapters analyse the water law concepts one by one; i.e. (a) ruling over waters, (b) water as an environmental component, (c) water as the subject of commercial deals (good or service), (d) water as cause of damage a.k.a. defence against water.
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Multilevel System of Fundamental Rights Protection in Practice, in the Light of the Dismissal of Government Officials without Justification
120-141Views:270Today, in the European multi-level and cooperative constitutional area the European Convention on Human Rights, the constitutional value provisions of the EU Treaties together with the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU, as well as the constitutions of the member states of the EU function as parallel constitutions. The legal remedies offered by international forums by nature are subsidiary, because it is desirable that legal issues of human rights be solved by the states at national level. The obligation of the exhaustion of domestic legal remedies as a procedural precon- dition is needed in order that the national level should have the chance to remedy the violation of human rights within its own legal system.
The present paper focuses on Art. 8 para. (1) of Act LVIII of 2010 on the legal status of government officials, which states that the employer has the right to terminate the contract of goverment officials by two months’ notice period without any justification. The research is of considerable interest because the dismissed officials – who, in my opinion, de facto suffered injury by violation of human rights – were forced to turn to international forums because of the fact that the Hungarian legal system was not able to grant them adequate reparation. Therefore, the examination also evaluates the current level of fundamental rights arbitration and the jurisdiction using fundamental principles in Hungary.
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Law and Artificial Intelligence: New character, old solutions? (Thoughts on the book of Jacob Turner)
137-145Views:726Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, buzzwords of the recent times. While the term was created in the 1950s, until recent times it was the domain of sci-fi writers, who tried to explore its impact on society and humanity. The recent breakthroughs in AI technology and the spread of AI based services created the need for lawmakers and legal scholars to try and tackle the problems that AI creates. Although there are a lot of publications in this area, the book from Jacob Turner stands out in the field. The author has researched the subject very well, and using this knowledge he asks and answers not only the most frequent questions, but also those questions that belong to the foundation of AI and law, and which are often overlooked. This review aims to present these questions and answers to the Hungarian public in a shorter form.
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The right to strike in the case-law of the ECtHR
115-133Views:356The right to strike has been long recognized as an important labour right in the European countries protected by constitutions and international conventions on labour and social rights. However, these international conventions mainly contain mere declarations to only pursue the right to strike and do not have an effective protection mechanism. Nevertheless, in the last few decades a human rights perspective on labour law gained ground and thus international organizations and international courts started to derive labour rights like the right to strike from civil and political rights and therefore some of these labour rights enjoy the same level of protection as the first generation human rights. In its recent judgements, the European Court of Human Rights stated that the right to strike is protected under Article 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights and developed a case law on the requirements of a lawful strike action, secondary strike actions and the restrictions of the right to strike.
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The Role of Non-Governmental Organisations in the Enforcement of Environmental Liability
113-127Views:452Public participation is an essential part of the mechanism of dealing with environmental problems. Both the Aarhus Convention and Union law stipulate that citizens and environmental NGOs should be guaranteed access to justice that includes providing legal standing for environmental NGOs individuals and directly affected by a breach of environmental law. In accordance with the Environmental Liability Directive, persons adversely affected by environmental damage are entitled to ask the competent authorities to take action. However, there are major chellenges to the implementation of environmental legislation, faced by environmental NGOs in obtaining standing to bring legal challenges on environmental issues.
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The Future of Animal Cruelty in the Context of Changing Public Morals
Views:199Thanks to the unstoppable rise of social media and other online communication channels, acts of animal cruelty and deficiencies in animal husbandry culture are now receiving increasing publicity. The research found that the growing interest in animal welfare reflects a broader shift in social attitudes. Whether we examine the assessment of animal cruelty at the level of morality or law, we see a rapidly and continuously changing process that is internally coherent. The objective of this study is based on this finding. First, by highlighting the depth of the relationship between morality and law, it demonstrates that these two institutions are inseparable and mutually influential. The following part of the study describes the development and current system of moral and legal norms relating to animal cruelty, and finally, through de lege ferenda proposals, it aims to provoke thought and initiate debate regarding the further development of the system.
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The Right Answer to the Diesel Scandal? The latest Reform of German Collective Redress through the Eyes of Outsiders
9-38Views:475The aim of the article is the understanding of the development, experiences and barriers of the the German collective redress mechanisms – from the point of view of a foreign researcher. When establishing a possibility for collective redress the course of the whole procedure and almost all segments are concerned. The case known as Volkswagen-dieselgate made the issue particularly crucial. Through this case, the author examines the new procedure introduced in November 2018. She also gives a brief overview of the class action in the US, concluded by a settlement between the Volkswagen Group and consumers. She tries to answer the question of whether the new law can be expected to provide an effective solution to the procedural issues that have arisen in this case. The analysis is also based on a review of previous sectoral regulation, which was the main basis of the development of the new regulation introduced in 2018.
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Rest Periods in EU Labour Law
75-92Views:427The paper aims to approach the dilemmas of EU working time rules from the novel perspective of rest periods. It examines the functions and nature of rest periods in EU law, with special regard to the ECJ’s recent judgment in the MÁV-Start case (C-477/21). The analysis tackles the question whether rest periods should be regarded as a right or an obligation of the worker and visits the issue of the possible role of a separate right to disconnect. The analysis ends with some conclusions.