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Less is Sometimes More? The Guaranteeing Role of the Scope of the Second Instance Review in the first Hungarian Code of Criminal Procedure (Act XXXIII of 1896)
Views:30At the time of the codification of first Hungarian Code of Criminal Procedure, the legal literature regarded the limited scope of second-instance revision as a limitation of appeal in favour of the defendant, and placed it in this sense inside the procedural doctrinal system. This idea, which is quite alien to contemporary procedural thinking, which focuses on speeding up and facilitating proceedings, raises the question: what are the principles on which the limited scope of review is considered as a guarantee for the defendant? In order to answer this question, my aim in the present study is to explore the system of principles that shaped the turn-of-the-century jurisprudence concerning the legal power of the second instance to grant review.
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Energy audit: EU-Law and its implementation in Germany
29-41Views:213The Energy Efficiency Directive (EED) No. 2012/27/EU establishes a set of binding measures to help the EU to reach its 20% energy efficiency target by 2020. Energy audits are an essential tool to achieve adequate energy savings (see art. 8. EED). The current study focuses on the EU legal requirement on Energy Audits and its implementation in Germany by the 2015 amended Act on Energy Services and other Energy Efficiency Measures (Gesetz über Energiedienstleistungen und andere Energieeffizienzmaßnahmen – EDL-G). The analysis is still relevant because of the infringement proceedings against Germany by the European Commission based on fragmentary transposition of the EED.
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Some Legal Challenges of Digital Inheritance with Special Regard to Privacy
84-98Views:295Digital 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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Collective Agreement’s Status in Law
Views:581The collective agreement is a Janus-faced legal phenomenon. From one side it has the nature of a contractual relationship where the parties have the right to determine the content of the contract, also including the choice itself, whether they establish it or not. On the other hand, the collective agreement acts as a legal norm as well. From this aspect its regulations are also obligatory for those persons who were not involved during the set-up process, or even for those who disagrees with some parts of the document. Therefore it is a crucial question in labour law as to how these contracts are handled by law. The Hungarian Labour Code came into force in 2012 contained an approach in which the legislator wanted to empower the legal status of collective agreement. To achieve this goal, in some parts the Act gives the parties the possibility to deviate from the law and to customize the norms in order to make it fit their current relationship. In this paper I examine the nature of the Collective Agreement and show its specialities in the Hungarian legal environment.
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Personal and Organizational Framework for the Activities of the Defence Counsel in Hungary
79-88Views:119In the Hungarian system of criminal procedure, several participants of the proceeding may provide activities aiming at the defence of the defendant (e.g. the prosecutor or even the defendant himself). My dissertation, however, shall focus on the activities of the defender based on delegation or recorded Power of Attorneys given, in consideration of the fact that almost without exception this personal group act as advocates in criminal procedures, furthermore, solely lawyers have the expertise necessary for the defence, and the “equality of arms” principle may only succeed completely through them.
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The Legal Status of Women in the Balkans from the 19th Century to the Present
101-123Views:283One of the most important pieces of legislation in Serbian history was the Serbian Civil Code (SCC) of 1844, which remained in force for more than 100 years. It dates back to the time when the country was still part of the Ottoman Empire and survived the state law regimes of the Principality of Serbia, the Kingdom of Serbia, the Kingdom of Serbs-Croats and Slovenians and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia before being liquidated by socialist Yugoslavia in 1945. From the moment it was created, there had been serious criticism, such as that it was modelled on the Austrian civil code and thus did not correspond to Serbian legal-social relations, and so there was no indication that it would be a durable piece of legislation. In its 100-year history, most of the criticism concerned the discriminatory provisions on women. Mostly, the legal situation of married women was detrimental, as they had no capacity to act, and were represented by their husbands. Their proclaimed equality took place in 1946, but they actually received the same legal status as men in the late 20th century.
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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:148Today, 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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Basic Trial Rights and Trial Ethics in Criminal Proceedings
32-55Views:194The number of criminal court trials is constantly decreasing, as the domestic legislature has introduced a number of legal institutions aimed at diverting criminal cases from the court system, or avoiding charging. Nevertheless, there will always be crimes, the adjudication of which cannot dispense with impeachment based on direct judicial investigation. The trial is undoubtedly the "highlight" of the criminal proceedings, since it is here that the adversarial process takes place in its entirety, and here the defense counsel and the prosecutor have the opportunity to form opinions on factual and legal issues in each other's personal presence. The amendment of the Criminal Procedure Act naturally raised many questions, such as who in the near future will actually control the evidence taken in court proceedings, and what basic procedural rights should be provided to the participants of the proceedings. In this study, I would like to reflect primarily on these questions, based on some ECtHR decisions.
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Principle of Environmental Integration – Thoughts on the 7th EU Environment Action Programme
31-51Views:187Integration of environmental requirements into other policies is a priority objective of the new, 7th environmental action programme of the EU. Principle of environmental integration was developed by the international environmental policy; it was inserted into environmental policy principles and into provisions of the Founding Treaty at the establishment of the EC environmental policy. The aim of the environmental integration principle harmful environmental effects, thus to serve sustainable development. Objectives of the EU sustainable development and sustainable growth strategies cannot be realized without integration of environmental requirements: integration of economic, social and environmental aspects of development can ensure the establishment of a resource- efficient, competitive economy, free from environmental degradation, improvement of quality of human life, meeting the needs of present and future generations, and preservation of natural resources which serves as the fundament for development of the other two pillars. Environmental integration is a principle provided for in the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, binding the decision-makers and legislators of the EU and the Member States; failure of its application might lead to judicial review and annulment of an act.
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Public Procurement Issues in the Field of Environmental Liability
175-188Views:200In public procurement, the principle of responsible management of public funds applies (Section 142 of the Public Procurement Act). This does not mean that only the techniques of fast-acting, quasi-abbreviated announcements or accelerated public procurement procedures are preferred, but on the contrary also direct tenders without general public procurement procedures are possible. The basis for efficient and transparent public expenditure at least are public procurement procedures that adhere to minimum procedural deadlines and create competition, i.e. facilitate the participation of as many bidders as possible. On the other hand, remedying environmental damage caused by third parties requires that the award of appropriate protection and remedial measures to the relevant contractors and the associated compliance with public procurement procedures do not cause delays that could contribute to extreme environmental degradation. In these cases, it is necessary to check whether there is a case of extreme urgency (imminent danger) and whether the award procedure can be omitted in whole or in part. In line with the above considerations, the present study, with reference to the Hungarian and EU regulations for public procurement, as well as comparative law with the inclusion of German and Austrian examples, examines whether the Hungarian legislator has additional leeway to prevent and quickly eliminate urgent or permanent serious environmental damage in accordance with procurement law.
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Knowledge of Law in the Hungarian Population Today and a Half Century Ago – A Comparative Analysis based on Kálmán Kulcsár’s Empirical Survey of 1965
11-28Views:248Knowledge of law is certainly one component of legal culture. Due to the support of the Hungarian Research Funds (OTKA) the authors of this paper carried out a comprehensive empirical analysis of this issue in Hungary. In doing so they strongly relied on Kálmán Kulcsár’s findings and insights stemming from his pathbreaking studies half a century ago.
The empirical study was carried out by the Szonda Ipsos Market and Opinion Research Institute in the framework of an omnibus questionnaire survey with a random sample of 1000 people in 2013. Thirteen questions essentially similar to certain questions used by Kulcsár in 1965 (for instance: Have you ever read a bill or an act? Have you ever participated in a judicial process? Who or which body enacts a bill in Hungary?) were posed in order to provide a possibility for the comparison of the actual results and those of Kulcsár.
We found that the general level of knowledge of law had increased substantially in the past decades. Knowledge related to constitutional law is the prominent example of this growth and it can definitely be coupled with the functioning of the democratic political system in the last 25 years. However, except from constitutional law, the growth of legal knowledge is due almost solely to the increased level of education and not a generally improved legal consciousness of the society.
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Human Rights as Fundamental Sources of Patients’ Rights in Light of the Development of Hungarian and German Laws
157-168Views:267Medical practice affects human life and health, which are not just some of the key social values, but actually express the existence of a human being. Therefore, it is a requirement to set the legal standards to guarantee the preservation and respect of human rights during medical treatment. Patients’ rights provide specific types of human rights in the area of patient care. The German legal system grants the preservation of these rights in a contractual framework that cannot be breached. In Hungary, patients’ rights are listed in the Public Health Act. Despite the diverse methods in regulating patients’ rights, the underlying public policy considerations are the same in both systems. The goal of this study is to provide a comparative analysis on the development of the German and the Hungarian regulation of patients’ rights focusing on the consideration of human rights.