Stephen Gardbaum in his essay explains what he calls the new Commonwealth model of constitutionalism. He argues that this emerging sui generis model comprises the benefits and avoids the pitfalls of both parliamentary supremacy and strong constitutional review.
Virág Zsugyó compares the Hungarian and the Turkish Constitutional Court's approach to the issue of unconstitutional constitutional amendments. She analyzes the context and challenges the two courts faced when attempting to assert such competence, and finds opposite results even though in both cases the text of the constitution only appears to allow for review of formal unconstitutionality.
Gábor Halmai in his essay assesses the jurisprudence of the Hungarian Constitutional Court in the first year, since judges nominated and elected without consensus exclusively by the governing party are in the majority. The study concludes that the politically most important decisions in the year rarely contain constitutional arguments, and serve overwhelmingly party political interests.
Close to the end of his nine year term, András Bragyova, judge of Hungarian Constitutional Court talked to Gábor Halmai about his experiences on the bench and views on the jurisprudence of the Court after the Fundamental Law of Hungary came into force. Bragyova claims that since the previous practice was not especially liberal on fundamental rights issues, there are no dramatic changes in the last years either, and there is still hope for compromises among the old and the new judges.
The contributions of Bernadette Somody, Beatrix Vissy, Fruzsina Gárdos-Orosz, Nóra Chronowski and Péter Tilk focus on the Hungarian Constitutional Court, with special regard to the jurisprudence of the period since the Fourth Amendment to the Fundamental Law came into effect. They discuss particular questions like the efficiency of the constitutional complaint mechanism, the lack of actio popularis, the curbed competence of reviewing financial and budget legislation and the issue of reference to previous case law.
Dóra Virág Dudás overviews the margin of appreciation doctrine of the European Court of Human Rights as applied to discretion in administrative decisions, and argues that administrative courts should incorporate the adequate, narrow or wide, test in their review.
Zsuzsa Kerekes comments on two decisions of the Constitutional Court divided on the issue of freedom of information, criticizing the attempt of the dissenters - who came close to forming a majority and who can now build on recent constitutional changes - to cancel the achievements of the last 25 years.
Mátyás Bencze comments on Hungarian hate crime jurisprudence and identifies a central cause for its failures, a phenomenon that he calls 'judicial populism,' a worrisome trend that results in systemic discrimination by mirroring political populism in the courtroom and relying on certain trends of public sentiments, most importantly about 'Roma criminality'.
In this column first a report of a US Supreme Court decision, then summaries of recent decisions of the European Court of Human Rights and the Hungarian Constitutional Court are presented.
Ágnes Kovács reviews Stephen Gardbaum's book, The New Commonwealth Model of Constitutionalism, Ágnes Merki reviews György Andrássy's book, Freedom of Language and Johanna Fröhlich reviews Zoltán Szente's recently published book titled Constitutional Reasoning and Interpretation. ■
Visszaugrás
