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• Judicial Review in Emergency Situations: the Relevant Case Law of the European Court of Human Rights

  200-218

  Gábor Mészáros

  Views:

  153

  Emergencies 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?

• The right to strike in the case-law of the ECtHR

  115-133

  Katalin Bagdi

  Views:

  242

  The 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.

• Multilevel System of Fundamental Rights Protection in Practice, in the Light of the Dismissal of Government Officials without Justification

  120-141

  Zsuzsanna Szabó

  Views:

  148

  Today, 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.

• A New Admissibility Criteria – the „Significant Disadvantage” in the Case-law of the European Court of Human Rights

  131-138

  Sándor Szemesi

  Views:

  132

  Since its adoption in 1950, the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms has established one of the best mechanism for the international protection of human rights. Because of the continuous increase of the European Court of Human Rights’ workload, the modification of the Court’s procedure was needed. During this reform, a new admissibility requirement is inserted in Article 35 of the Convention, which empowers the Court to declare inadmissible applications where the applicant has not suffered a significant disadvantage. This new admissibility criteria is applicable since 1 June 2010 (when Protocol No. 14. entered into force). The study examines the travaux preparatoires and the current text of the Protocol, and analyzes the case-law of the Court concerning this new criteria.

• The Effect of the Jurisprudence of the ECHR on the Hungarian Criminal Procedure Act

  128-150

  Krisztián Szabó

  Views:

  308

  The case law of the European Court of Human Rights and the European Convention on Human rights set the minimum level for the protection of fundamental rights that has to be guaranteed by all contracting parties, although national laws can establish higher standards. Point II of the general explanations of Bill No. T/13972 on the new Act on Criminal Procedure states that “meeting the requirements of the Fundamental Law of Hungary and the obligations of international law and EU law obviously mean a safeguarding minimum.” In Hungary the case law of the ECHR is reflected more and more both in the judgements of Hungarian courts and in the guidelines of higher courts but the difficulties of establishing interpretations in harmony with ECHR case law are common. The paper analyses the judgments of the ECHR in Hungarian cases between 2013 and 2016 related to pretrial detention, effective defence and the circumstances of restraint.