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The EU Energy Efficiency Directive (EED) from an Environmental Law Perspective
63-87Views:301This paper will focus on the 2012/27/EU Energy Efficiency Directive (EED). Since the EED is a rather new legal act, its assessment from an environmental law perspective has been neglected in academic literature. Therefore, the next question automatically arises: does the new directive take steps to improve the EU regulations concerning energy efficiency? The EED undoubtedly took a step forward by providing legally binding frameworks for the reduction of energy consumption (instead of the previous political and non-binding energy efficiency goals) and has done this in an absolute way, which is the most important requirement from an ecological point of view. Beyond the special targets of the EED, there are several specific requirements that may play a significant role in the realisation of the EED’s targets. Among these, for instance the following is highlighted in this paper: establishing energy efficiency obligation schemes or adopting alternative policy measures; the 3% commitment of renovation regarding central government buildings; the obligation of energy audits regarding enterprises that are not small or medium-sized, etc. This paper concludes that, despite a few provisions of the directive meeting the ecological requirements, in reality, the regulation misses theoretical ground.
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Is the New Regulation Justified? Applicability of the New Rules of Self-defense in Case-law
129-147Views:288In the history of the regulation of self-defense, Act C of 2012 has resulted in the most substantial change. The greatest innovation in the act is the introduction of the situational self-defense, which creates an irrebuttable presumption that the unlawful attacks carried out under certain circumstances shall be considered as attacks against life. The new regulation has been criticized a lot, mostly because there are fears that the new rules of law will be misused. Through the case-law of the Supreme Court relating to self-defense in the last ten years, this study intends to reveal whether it was justified to include the situational self-defense in the new law or whether the concerns in connection with situational self-defense can be considered legitimate.
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The Legal Status of Victims of Sexual Violence in International, European Union and Domestic Law
Views:113The study describes the concept and the legal status of the victim of sexual violence in view of the fact that the definition of victim in criminal procedure law is not the same as the broader definition of victim used in criminology at domestic or international levels. The Me Too movement drew attention to a problem in 2017 that is still waiting to be solved years later: preventing and eradicating violence against women, as well as making the role of the victims during procedure and their legal options more effective. A brief, overview categorization of this legal situation shows what emerging tendencies can be discovered in the European Union’s legislative process nowadays, and based on these, what the problematic areas are in domestic law where change is needed.
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Artificial Intelligence from the Viewpoint of Civil Law
28-41Views:1221The 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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Work of Costantino Mortati in the Field of Public Law
23-41Views:114The aim of my article is to present an overview of certain stages of Costantino Mortati’s scientific work (Constitutional Court’s judge and professor of law) on the basis of Italian bibliography. His most popular work, entitled “the Constitution in material sense” (1940) conforms to problems and methodology of Italian constitutional law, while it reflects to contemporary schools of European jurisprudence and changes of institutions and theories of modern state. Behind Mortati’s theories about the State and the Constitution, the Italian liberal state regarded as heritage of risor- gimento, and the symptoms of its crises, birth and fall of the totalitarian state and the fundamental public law-aspects of the democratic and republic state can be found.
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The General Theory of the State and the Relativity of the Force of Law – Comment on the Theory of Georg Jellinek
53-72Views:172This paper makes an in-depth examination of the theory established by Georg Jellinek who – extending the perspective of the jurisprudence of state law based on legal methods – was concerned with issues of public law within the frames of general theory of the state. The author will demonstrate the claim that the special concepts of Jellinek’s general and descriptive theory – like the „presupposition of factual validity” or the idea of the „state’s self-obligation to law” – are the results of Jellinek’s idea that there were no alternatives to the institutional system of the constitutional monarchy.
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A divatszakmában dolgozó munkások védelmének helyzete
105-129Views:385The global fashion industry is characterized by a dynamic and complex supply chain. Clothing products and footwear reach consumers through various brands, from developing countries to Western countries. The exploitation of workers at the bottom of the supply chain goes hand in hand with huge benefits for those at the top of the supply chain. Due to the lack of direct contact with workers, brand owners and resellers often ignore the abuse of workers ’rights in the production of their products. Labor law rules alone are not enough to improve working conditions and ensure the rights of workers in the fashion industry. Brand owners and resellers have a vital role to play in changing their working conditions. By incorporating “soft law” solutions such as the UN Business and Human Rights Guidelines and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Screening Guide, responsible business conduct can be achieved. Incorporating voluntary initiatives into the business behaviors of brand owners and resellers has a significant impact on improving employee rights. In this study, I assess how the 2016 Transparency Draft has affected the protection of workers in the global fashion industry, how much the inclusion of Transparency and Sustainable Development Goals has improved the situation of exploitation of workers. The ILO regularly examines the issue through its analysis of human rights reports.
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The International Legal Framework of Maritime Piracy
161-177Views:287Although maritime piracy is the oldest crime committed at sea, it is still present to this day and counts as a threat: it not only endangers human lives but also causes damage to international trade. Firm actions must be taken against this international crime and those international agreements which define the definition and the elements of conduct of maritime piracy and also contain procedural provisions to suppress it count as vital elements of these actions. Currently there are two agreements which contain anti-piracy regulations and they regulate several matters appropriately but they also have many shortcomings. In this article I examine the anti-piracy regulations of these agreements.
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Hungarian Regulation of Temporary Agency Work from the Aspect of EU Directives
55-78Views:991Temporary agency work was introduced into Hungarian law on the 1st July 2001. After nearly two decades of experience and numerous legislative changes, the domestic regulation of agency work is still not finished or coherent, and it is burdened with a number of EU harmonization shortcomings, constitutional concerns and practical problems. The purpose of this study is to examine the Hungarian legal regulation of temporary agency work from the point of view of EU law, while also highlighting a number of issues of domestic law that need to be clarified.
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Defences in International Criminal Law
35-53Views:126The Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) was adopted at a diplomatic conference in Rome on 17 July 1998 and it entered into force on 1 July 2002. The ICC Statute contains rules regarding grounds for excluding criminal responsibility but this list is not exhaustive since other defences are recognized in international (criminal) law. This essay will not examine the special procedural defences and other obstacles of punishability which are explicitly rejected by the ICC Statute but focus on the substantial defences in international law: the lack of responsibility under a certain age; insanity and intoxication; justifiable defence; necessity and duress; mistake; superior orders; belligerent reprisals and military necessity.
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The Protection of Fundamental Rights of People with Disabilities and Reduced Capacity to Work Using Social Farm Services
83-100Views:189The present study examines the fundamental rights of disabled people using the service of social farms – especially people with disabilities and with reduced capacity to work. These rights are essential for these people in order to ensure their employment. These people are often cut off from the labour market, moreover, they cannot be present there. Therefore, fundamental rights ensured within the Fundamental Law of Hungary play a significant role for treating and employing them equally. Labour law and social law protection confirms this constitutional protection.
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A Philosophical Approach to Law
11-22Views:171Bjarne 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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Back-Door Electronic Monitoring in Hungary: Theory and Practice of Reintegrative Surveillance
30-42Views:338With the development of technology many new legal institutions were regulated in the criminal justice systems. Electronic monitoring is one of those, which from the Hungarian perspective first appeared in the form of home detention in criminal procedure law. Later on, in 2015 the technology of electronic monitoring was implemented in prison law as the institution of reintegrative surveillance. The regulation is basically appropriate and according to the experiences could be seen as effective. However, there are some related theoretical questions which need to be answered. For example, the question of widening the potential application of reintegrative surveillance, or the relation between reintegrative surveillance and imprisonment or conditional release. Answering these questions is important as presumably the technological development won’t stop on this level, thus we can expect the widening of electronic monitoring in Hungary as well.
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The main factors influencing the level of the knowledge of law
71-95Views:202The paper deals with the level of legal knowledge among the Hungarian population measured with a representative survey asking questions regarding the knowledge of certain constitutional, civil, administrative and procedural legal rules releant in everyday life. Our findings are compared to a research carried out in 1965, using the same questions. Furthermore we analysed the relationship of knowledge level as a dependent variable with (i) socio-demographic (gender, age, education, etc.), (ii) media consumption (some 30 written, electronic and internet-based items), (iii) interaction with the legal system (read a law, consulted with a lawyer, participated in a trial) and (iv) civic activity. We found that the level of education is crucial, and interaction with the legal system has some additional significant impact, too. All other independent variables seem to have less significance or no impact at all. The relative strength of explanatory variables has largely changed in the past decades and in some cases even the direction of impact altered (for example women seem to be more educated about the law nowadays, in a sharp contrast to the 1965 data.)
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Regulation of Autonomous Vehicles in Public International Law, in particular on the Subject of International Road Traffic
37-49Views:184The study examines the regulation of autonomous vehicles in public international law, more specifically the regulation related to the territory of international road traffic. Within this topic, the study defines autonomous, or in other words, self-driving vehicles, reveals the relation between these kind of vehicles and public international law, describes the results and steps made so far toward uniform regulation and analyzes the possibilities for future regulation. In connection with the latter, the study concentrates on the question of international treaties and would like to answer whether it is necessary and possible to conclude an international treaty on autonomous vehicles.
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Strict Liabiliy and Predictability: The Austrian Economic Analysis of Tort Law
Views:92This article provides a critical analysis of the main claims of the Austrian school of law and economics on tort liability. It reviews the normative claims of the Austrian school. It identifies the requirements the Austrian achool articultes towards law and which can be described in five points. According to them positive law should be (i) abstract, (ii) simple, (iii) predictable, (iv) should change incrementally, and (v) should reflect the basic informal rules, social expectations. They maintain that in the case of tort liability, a prima facie strict liability would meet these requiremes much better than the negligence rule. The article contests this claim and argues that it is not clear that the strict liability would be more predictable or better suited to informal social rules.
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Crimean Secession in International Law
9-28Views:325This article provides detailed insights into the validity of remedial secession, the two major judicial opinions that have addressed it (Kosovo advisory opinion by the International Court of Justice, and the Quebec Secession Reference case decided by the Supreme Court of Canada), and the steep, but evolving, path to legitimacy it may now be travelling. This article does so within the context of Crimea’s secession referendum, declaration of independence, and de facto statehood, and Russia’s annexation of Crimea. It covers the international community’s reaction to these events – and the disparity among academic reactions to the vitality of remedial secession. It traces the UN General Assembly’s 2014 Crimean debate – concluding that it is the most authoritative referee for judging Russia’s claim to the validity of the Crimean secession.
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The Basic Regulatory Issues of Agricultural Application of Precision Genome Editing and the Precautionary Principle
42-64Views:334The rapidly developing gene manipulation techniques (more recently „gene editing”) have long been controversial, which is reflected in the evolution of legal regulation in Europe. Hungaryʼs Fundamental Law (Art. XX.) clearly states that Hungarian agriculture desires to remain free from genetically modified organisms. According to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA resolution, 2017), the results of the new techniques (without transgenic implantation) are not regarded as GMOs (by the proper application of the genetic engineering law), these new techniques are not governed by the provisions of the Fundamental Law. Recently, a lawsuit was filed before the Court of Justice of the European Union in which the main question was whether GMOs should be considered the result of new techniques (if not, they do not need to be licensed). In the light of a detailed analysis of the precautionary principle, the study examines the question of whether genetic engineering or its results cover the scope of the legislation. According to the author, this question (as long as the revision of the regulation is not on the agenda) is not for the genetic technologists and plant breeders, but for the lawyers to decide. The conclusion of the study is that genetic engineering, respectively its results are subject to the regulation.
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Collection of Annotated Bibliographies (2010. Nr. 3)
138-176Views:131An annotated bibliography of recent Hungarian legal science books is published regularly (twice a year) in our journal. The annotation is a short, factual description of the usefulness of the book, which, in addition to bibliographic information, defines the genre and briefly outlines the subject matter and the results presented. The authors of the annotations are members of the Faculty of Law of the University of Debrecen (lecturers, PhD students or gradual students). The current issue presents the third part of the book descriptions of books published in 2013.
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Collective Wage Bargaining and the Related Challenges of Labour Law and Labour Relations Regarding Public Services Operated by Publicly Owned Companies
148-161Views:258In the case of state- and municipality-owned companies providing public services, the 2021 salary increase was settled with a six-monthly delay, which was manifested in three-year, so-called “income policy” agreements. However, for the purposes of this paper, the process became relevant mainly due to the aspect of labor relations and it also became suitable for a legal science analysis. During the course of this, within the available space limits, I discuss the process of salary negotiations (with its labor law content and consequences), the theoretical bases of the different collective labor law regulations regarding public assets, and finally, the newly emerging practical issues related to the strike rights regulation of this sector.
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Higher Level Prevention as Public Value in Competition Law
133-152Views:130The problem-solving mechanism developed by Sparrow in the field of social regulation could also be implemented in competition law in order to prevent the recurrence of competition problems in a given industry. Competition authorities’ (like protection-type agencies) aim is the creation of public value. This is measured in terms of their ability to solve social problems by preventing or controlling harms. In the case of competition authorities, the public value is achieved by ensuring a competitive market environment through the curtailment of market power and the removal of barriers to entry. The public value of prevention is especially important when markets tend to become concentrated. In order to achieve the maximum preventive effect, all prevention tools must be operated effectively. This includes imposing structural remedies or switching to ex-ante prevention (regulation) when ex-post enforcement proves ineffective.
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The Hungarian Legal System and Company Law in the Light of a Book Published in English
256-259Views:93Book review on Sándor, István (ed.): Business Law in Hungary. (Patrocínium kiadó, Budapest, 2016, 774.)
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Discretion in Taxation Procedures
107-130Views:148Besides decisions conditioned by law we have to examine decisions based on discretion as well. If vested by law with discretionary powers, the tax authority shall exercise such rights as consistent with the purpose of authorization and within the framework of law. It is very important how the framework is defined by the legislator and what kind of facts are taken into consideration in the discretion process (e.g. the nature and willfulness of violation). Discretion process must be separated from fairness, estimation, practice and interpretation of the law. In connection with remedy the extension and the detail of explanation in the resolution has high importance. The persuasion of the taxpayer is also a relevant question to investigate.
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Working Through Internet in Hungarian Law. Regulation Instead of Banning?
83-95Views:415Working through digital platforms and apps is a new and rare form of work in Hungary. The spread of digital work is quite new all over the world and also part of the wider trend of precarious forms of work. Hungarian labour law faces serious challenges regarding crowdsourcing and working via apps. The main question is how to insert these new forms of work into the existing labour law framework. These new forms may hardly be considered as employment relationships due to the serious differences. Self-employment cannot be the solution either, since it would leave workers without any employment protection. Therefore, regulation of digital work is unavoidable, even if its details are far from clear for the moment.
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Detrimental effects of tax havens and the case of the Dutch tax system
45-67Views:283Nowadays, multinationals have become so strong that they can easily compete with states. Consequently, they have the opportunity to develop several tax minimalization strategies such as transfer pricing, inversion, hybrid entities etc. All these have a negative impact on the world economy and state budgets. Despite detrimental effects, certain countries try to cooperate with multinationals by transforming themselves into tax havens. In this framework, they provide multinationals with various kinds of tax advantages such as deductions, low tax rates and preferential tax rulings (“sweetheart deals”). Although, the general attitude towards tax avoidance in the European Union is negative, particular member states’ tax systems display several characteristics of tax havens. In this regard, it should be noted that multinationals regularly use the loopholes and other advantages of the Dutch tax system to minimise their tax liability. The following study – after a brief view to the characteristics of tax havens– will illustrate these options by highlighting the fact that the country – despite the denial of the respective governments – still displays several characteristics of - tax havens.