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Central Issues of the Application of EU Law in the Recent Case Law of the Hungarian Constitutional Court
161-174Views:119The 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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Constitutional Foundations of EU Membership in Hungary Before and After the new Fundamental Law
29-47Views:225The paper examines the Hungarian constitutional framework which determines the relationship between domestic and EU law. The constitutional foundations changed in 2011 when the new constitution, the Fundamental Law was adopted. The former 1989 Constitution contained in Article 2/A the so-called ’European clause’ adopted before EU accession, which was referred to as the main constitutional basis of Hungary’s EU membership by the Constitutional Court. The new Fundamental Law contains a seemingly similar ’European clause’ in Article E. The paper scrutinizes the question whether the former and the new clauses are truly similar and concludes that opposite to the Constitutional Court’s point of view the new European clause should be interpreted differently from the former, which might lead to a different, less Europe-friendly approach towards EU membership.
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The Basic Thesis of the State Theory of Győző Concha: "Theory of Constitiution"
133-160Views:308Győző Concha’s book “Politika”, published in 1895, is still relevant for the understanding of the theoretical problems in constitutional law. Thus, it is important to analyse the peculiar use of constitutional terms in his theory in order to understand his unique interpretation of the concept of the constitution and its relevance for political and legal philosophy. The methodological goal of the research is to present the meaning of the concepts used by Concha, and to highlight their functional role. It is also an important question as to how Concha’s constitutional theory was incorporated into his political philosophy, and how these concepts are interpreted in today’s political and legal terminology. It is also the paper’s aim to “translate” Concha’s vocabulary and constitutional theory into the language used in 21st century constitutional theories, and to present and evaluate the relevance of his constitutional theory in understanding the current constitutional problems of political communities.
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Likeness of Police Officers: Freedom of the Press and the Right to Facial Likeness at the Crossroads of Civil and Fundamental Rights
110-128Views:186The Constitutional Court of Hungary, proceeding in its new competence regarding the „real” constitutional complaint obtained from 1 January 2012, is allowed to adjudicate the motions initiated against concrete judicial decisions which are deemed to be contrary to the Fundamental Law of Hungary. Within this procedure the Constitutional Court places the protection of the freedom of expression and freedom of the press above the protection of personality rights. The Court consistently annuls judicial decisions that declare infringement of personality rights on grounds that a press agency published recognizable facial likeness of police officers being on duty during demonstrations. The present paper analyses the course during which the Constitutional Court does enforce the constitutional requirements elaborated in its former practice and, thereby, repeals the ordinary courts’ decisions if those favour the personality rights of police officers over the freedom of the press.
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Protection of Marriage and Family in Central Europe
7-31Views:270It is no exaggeration to say that family plays a prominent role in our daily lives. This study therefore examines the constitutional and family law foundations of family protection in seven Central European countries. The study describes, among other things, the nature of family law legislation, the conceptual approach to family and marriage, the legal protection and solution of extramarital partnerships, such as de facto partnerships and registered partnerships, and the status of children in the countries studied.
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Organic laws and the principle of democracy in France and Spain
62-74Views:147During the last decades, several countries have entrenched a special subcategory of law, which is adopted by stricter procedural rules than that of the ordinary legislative process. These laws are enacted by qualified majority, by the consent of the two chambers of the legislature, and they are subject to mandatory constitutional review before their promulgation, or additional safeguards are implemented in the ordinary legislative process. In this study, I compare the experiences of two crucial legal systems, France and Spain, which provide two different frameworks of qualified law. My aim is to identify the most contested issues from the legal nature of qualified laws, and to seek the proper solutions of these issues, as well as an ideal model of qualified law. My contribution focuses on the relationship between qualified laws and the principle of democracy, and aims to open up new perspectives in this regard.
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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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Questions of divisions of powers in the 21st century after the adoption of the new Fundamental Law of Hungary
24-37Views:341The question of division of state powers is a crucial part of constitutional law determining how state organs work (or should work) in theory and in practice. After the adoption of the new Fundamental Law of Hungary, there are some modifications in the Hungarian constitutional system, including the division of powers as well. In this study we examine the original model of “3 branches of power – 1-1 function” as a starting point, and the other factors and branches which can modify the original model. In the study we try to focus to the examples of the former and present Hungarian legal system as certain proves of our theory about the new frameworks of division of powers in Hungary. In the end of this study we also examine, as an indirect argumentation, the opposite side of the separation of powers, i.e. concentration of powers.
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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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The Problem of Defining Criminal Norms Precisely. The „Clarity of Norms” Doctrine in the Decisions of the Hungarian Constitutional Court and in Judicial Practice
37-59Views:357The principles of legality in criminal law determine numerous requirements both for the legislator creating criminal statutes and for judges as well who decide criminal cases. One of the most important demands of legality is the principle of maximum certainty according to which the state must establish a system of criminal law in which the wording of the statutes are clear, precise and understandable for the citizens; and judges are able to interpret criminal rules without making arbitrary decisions. In the Hungarian legal system the demands of maximum certainty are represented by the principle of nullum crimen sine lege. This principle is called the „clarity of norms” doctrine in the practice of the Constitutional Court of Hungary (HCC) which is entitled to strike down criminal statutes which do not meet its requirements. The aim of this paper is to argue for the claim that the „clarity of norms doctrine” and the concept of certainty in criminal law is based mostly on considerations about the plain meaning of words and texts and lack a coherent theoretical background in the decisions of the HCC and in judicial practice as well. The author offers a more complex and coherent conception of certainty stating that its requirements relate not only to linguistic considerations but also to thinking over the moral and political values of criminal law as well.
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Risks and Adverse Effects: Decisions of the Italian Constitutional Court on the Compulsory COVID-19 Vaccination
102-127Views:227In recent years, several judicial and constitutional court decisions have been handed down worldwide on the legality and constitutionality of the fundamental rights restrictive measures (including compulsory vaccination) imposed during the pandemic. Aside from Austria, Italy has imposed compulsory vaccination more widely than any other European country; moreover, the lack of vaccination has made it impossible for citizens to live their daily lives to such an extent that some scholars have even written of de facto compulsory vaccination. In December 2022, the Italian Constitutional Court ruled in three judgments against the petitions related to compulsory vaccination. After outlining the legal context and the scholars’ positions on mandatory Covid vaccination, this paper examines these decisions, focusing on the arguments on which the Court saw justification for compulsory vaccination.
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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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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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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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Hungarian legislative changes induced by the case-law of European Court of Human Rights
109-122Views:168Indisputably, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has an effect on national legal systems. In this study I examine the type of this effect in the Hungarian legal system through the case law of the year 2014, and as an outcome, I would like to demonstrate that the ECtHR has both direct and indirect impacts on the national legislation in Hungary. As a result of the judgments’ direct impact, changes are made in the national legislation, meanwhile the indirect impact can only be detected in the decisions of the Hungarian Constitutional Court or domestic courts. Obviously, the direct impact is the most significant and most noticeable, however, the significance of indirect impact has been gradually increasing in the recent period. Based on this idea, I would like to point out that both effects are present in the Hungarian legislation, and seem to show an increasing trend, although the judicial bodies mean an exception in this practice. Nonetheless, according to the European practice, the judicial bodies will most likely refer to the international norm and the case law of the ECtHR in the near future.
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The Right to Maintain Contact within the Context of Fundamental and Personality Rights
Views:682It 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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Judicial Review in Emergency Situations: the Relevant Case Law of the European Court of Human Rights
200-218Views:153Emergencies are mostly sudden, and in most cases states need special measures to deal with them. For this reason liberal democracies have standing constitutional or special legal powers to derogate human rights for the sake of order. Those democracies that do not have such powers, use impromptu ones. It is possible for authoritarian governments to abuse emergency powers in order to stay in power, to derogate human rights and to silence the opposition. Therefore it is essential for a liberal democracy to have strict limits for the duration, circumstance and scope of emergency powers. There are human rights regimes (for example: the European Convention on Human Rights) which have to respect the member states’ duty and responsibility in such cases. This article tries to examine this special case law of the European Court of Human Rights. The question is whether a European Human Rights regime is capable of becoming the guardian of human rights in cases of national emergencies, or the sovereignty of states also means that there is very narrow margin to prove legality above security?
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The Constitutional Obstacles before the Promulgation of the Rome Statute
45-59Views:368July 17, 1998, can be considered as one of the most important milestones of the international judicial structure: it is the day when the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court was adopted by 120 states out of 148. Article 86 of Statute explicitly states that „States Parties shall […] cooperate fully with the Court in its investigation and prosecution of crimes within the jurisdiction of the Court.” As in the case of every international treaty, the principle of pacta sunt servanda enshrined in Article 26 of the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of the Treaties states applies, which explicitly states that “every treaty in force is binding upon the parties to it and must be performed by them in good faith.” As has been pointed out by the Permanent Court of International Justice, contracting states must make all the necessary internal measures which are required to fulfil its international obligations rising from a binding treaty. One could ask, why is this quite obvious argument important in the case of Hungary? Well, Hungary has ratified the Statute but still has not implemented it in its internal legislation. This can be considered as a serious constitutional omission, since if the Court would require the cooperation of Hungary – e.g. in the case of an arrest warrant – and it would not be able to fulfil it because of the lack of the internal legal norms, it would be considered as international legal responsibility of Hungary. In this article, I try to explore the reasons behind this omission and outline the possible solutions.
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A Cutting-Edge” Criminal Procedure? : Some Reflections on the Modernization of Hungarian Criminal Procedure Law
11-36.Views:302The study analyses the new Hungarian Criminal Procedure Act that entered into force in the summer of 2018. One aspect of the analysis is whether certain institutions of the law fulfil the constitutional requirements of criminal procedure. The other aspect is a sociological one. The past decades have brought many new developments in the field of society, economy and technology. The study, therefore, also revolves around the question of whether the new Criminal Procedure Act provides an adequate response to these challenges. The main finding of the study is that the legislation made the first steps in the right direction, however it did not introduce all the changes that would be necessary for a fair and modern criminal procedure. Besides, the act reflects predominantly the interests of the authorities while the rights and interests of other participants of the criminal procedure are not taken into consideration with the same weight
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The Intergenerational justice at the Constitutional Level
48-64Views:169The debates about the rights of the future generations have risen significantly in the last decade. The more attention we give to the question, the larger the number of new issues which emerge. As an example, the right to a healthy environment or the rights of the unborn can be mentioned. The aim of the study is to examine this question in connection with constitutions. The constitutional level could significantly affect the possibilities of the future generations. The theory of intergenerational justice is examined in relation to the main topic. The analysis of the population pyramid of the Brexit voters is mentioned as an example of a possible intergenerational injustice.
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’The more speech, the better’: Review of the Book of András Koltay on New Media and Freedom of Speech
Views:279At first glance, the new book of András Koltay seems to be a translation of his recently published volume, New Media and Freedom of Expression: Rethinking the Constitutional Foundations of the Public Sphere (Hart International, 2019). Therefore, one would expect that the work itself does not provide any new information to those who already know the original in English. That could not be less true. As we get to the bottom of this false impression, the review shows the many virtues and minor mistakes of the book.
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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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The Public Prosecution Service of the Slovak Republic – Constitutional and Legal Background
89-100Views:102A szlovákiai ügyészség alkotmányos jogállása és törvényi szabályozása hosszú ideje vita tárgya. Az érdeklődés egyik oka kétségkívül az, hogy az ügyészség tevékenységének, hatáskörének szabályozása a szakmai és a laikus nyilvánosságot is érinti. A figyelem elsősorban az ügyészség alkotmányos helyzetére, az ügyészség egyes szintjei, továbbá az ügyészség és a közhatalom más szervei közötti viszonyokra, valamint a büntetőügyek területén érvényesülő, s azokon kívüli hatáskörre irányul. Ez a tanulmány is e viszonyok tisztázására, a Szlovák Köztársaság ügyészségére vonatkozó régi és újabb közjogi rendelkezések bemutatására vállalkozik.
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The Transfer of Contract on the Basis of Statutory Provisions: Novation or Succession?
7-27Views:227In 2016, the Act CLXXVII of 2013 on the Transitional and Authorizing Provisions related to the Entry into Force of Act No. V of 2013 on the Civil Code (’Ptké.’) was amended, with questions of interpretation arising regarding the transfer of contract on the basis of statutory provisions. Therefore, after a short period of rest, the transfer of contract, the novation, and their relationship again became the focus of the attention of both legal scholars and practitioners. After a short introduction of the legal provisions on the transfer of contract, the amendment of 2016 and its reasons are reviewed. Then, both the controversies that emerged in the judicial practice and the answers given by the Hungarian Constitutional Court and the Curia are examined thoroughly.