Hungary is one of those few countries in our region where the national criminal code lacks any crime designed to prosecute a hypothethical military attack against the country. Such a crime based on international law would create the potential for a competent international tribunal to prosecute aggression. The promulgation of the crime of aggression is therefore an important legal-political interest among the changing security conditions, even if Hungary has filed for termination of the Rome Statute.
This paper therefore offers several considerations for a future definition of such a crime. As a first step in that endevour, the policital connotations of the crime are identified. This is followed by a brief summary of the acutal conducts attaching personal responsibility to an act of aggression. In order to specify the actual content of the four criminalized conducts, the acts of all the IMT defendants are examined, who were charged with crimes against peace.
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In our study, we examine some of the connections between war, justice, and cruelty. We briefly review some classic interpretations of just war (including the concepts of St. Augustine and Hugo Grotius), then outline the emergence of an international system based on the prohibition of violence. We then explain a possible moral interpretation of just war and briefly analyze current wars based on the theory outlined above. We understand cruelty as the infliction of unacceptable suffering. An important question in our paper is whether a just war can be cruel. We answer this question in the affirmative and justify our position, again using examples, primarily from contemporary armed conflicts.
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Since the leaders of the Russian Federation launched an invasion of Ukraine, disregarding one of the cornerstones of modern international law, namely the peremptory norm of the prohibition of the use of force between states, the terms unprovoked and provoked have often been associated with this flagrant violation of international law. The study examines the terminological question of why it is incorrect, in relation to the Russian aggression (and, more generally, to any act of aggression), to speak of "unprovokedness", and even more so of "provocation". The call for the proper use of legal terminology is, nevertheless, not intended as an exercise in technical language for its own sake, but, it is hoped, as a substantive contribution to the scholarly literature analysing a norm violation that has fundamentally shaken the contemporary system of international law.
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In this study, we explore the theoretical roots and current implications of why the post-World War II international legal order collapsed and why the UN and the International Criminal Court have been weakened. We are currently at a point where, in the midst of diplomatic negotiations, wars that are prohibited by the UN Charter are being waged, or aggressors are escalating their missile attacks, sometimes even state leaders who are under arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court. Based on the Donroe strategy, which was created from the Monroe Doctrine, the US president does not respect the sovereignty of certain states in his aggressive, even armed foreign policy, while keeping his distance but colluding with the empire-building ambitions of another, equally expansionist aggressor superpower. Meanwhile, as a permanent member of the UN Security Council, he is openly destroying the organization of the international community of nations and, as an alternative, is building his own international "peace organization" as a kind of private organization. Certain great powers and their allies want to conquer again by force, in response to which a European great power is planning to develop nuclear weapons for defensive purposes. The question rightly arises: why are the international organizations designated for this purpose unable to
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ensure international law and order, and with it peace and security, and why have the ideas of great power conquest been revived? In our view, this is mainly explained by the spread of incorrect and dangerous theories. Empty formalism and aggressive great sphere theory are both based on violence, while the universal idea of the unconditional and equal dignity of all persons and peoples has been pushed into the background.
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The article examines the ICC jurisdiction over the crime of aggression as it was covered in the original form of the Rome Statute and in the actual version following the 2010 Kampala Amendment. The difficulties caused by the dispositions on adoption and entry into force of the amendment and in the related documents as well as the current reform proposals are under scrutiny.
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The study examines to what extent armistice agreements and peace treaties that terminate armed conflicts can be regarded as valid when they are inevitably concluded in a context of force and coercion. Its starting point is that, in most inter-state armed conflicts, the UN Security Council neither determines the existence of aggression, nor authorizes the use of force, nor takes part in the conclusion of peace - yet in practice the parties have not invoked the invalidity of peace treaties on the ground of force or coercion. The article presents the relevant rules of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (in particular the provisions on treaties concluded by the threat or use of force and on ius cogens), and then, drawing on concrete case studies - including peace settlements in the Middle East, Africa and Latin America - analyses how practice "neutralizes" coercion. It highlights the legitimizing role of mediators, witnesses and guarantor states, the importance of temporal distance (armistice versus later peace treaty), and the doctrinal argument that the conclusion of a peace treaty - the restoration
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of peace and security - is a primary value in the international legal order, which in practice pushes the logic of invalidity due to coercion into the background.
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This study examines the evolution of European Union action in the interrelated fields of education, culture, and family, with particular regard to the scope and limits of competences. Although these areas did not form part of the original objectives of European integration, since the 1970s both EU legislation and the case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union have progressively expanded the Union's room for manoeuvre. The paper argues that this development has been driven, on the one hand, by an expansive interpretation of internal market competences, and, on the other, by the increasingly broad application of EU fundamental rights. Following the principles articulated in the Edicom case, EU regulation has come to affect areas that, according to the Treaties, remain primarily within Member State competence. The paper contends that this evolution could lead to a disruption of the balance established by the Treaties and weakens the safeguards protecting the vertical division of competences, in particular the principle of subsidiarity. The analysis also addresses the role of immaterial public policy and national identity, which - although theoretically capable of limiting EU action -have not proven sufficiently effective in judicial practice. In a broader perspective, the study emphasizes that education, culture, and family constitute fundamental pillars of communal identity and intellectual self-determination. It concludes that EU action in these fields should remain essentially supportive and complementary in nature, in line with the requirements of preserving diversity and Member State autonomy.
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The Comparative Law Department, established in 1963 at the Institute of Political and Legal Sciences of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, initiated the movement of comparativism, which slowly spread throughout the country, initially by collecting foreign legal sources relating to a given area of regulation and publishing them in Hungarian. Initially, it rejected comparisons between the laws of "bourgeois" and
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"socialist" regimes as different types of law, but then began to make comparisons between the laws of identical socio-economic formations as "internal" and those between different formations as "external". On the one hand, this reinforced the Marxist view of law as a superstructure component as determined by the socio-economic base, and on the other hand, it emphasized the importance of the technical component of law and its essential worldwide community, which, unlike the former dependency, as capable of demonstrating relative independence. With all this, Academician Director Imre Szabó freed socialist jurisprudence from its Cold War isolation under the banner of comparatio iuris, and, although in a contradictory direction, elevated it to a partner of the West that now demanded equality. In contrast to the legal systems that emerged as early Bolshevism, later fascism, and then National Socialism, which were unable to make recognized either their relatively separate status or their specific characteristics between the two world wars, now so-called socialist law has become a sui generis challenger, even a direct competitor, to so-called bourgeois law. Behind it, legal scholarship, now in cooperation with the West in a kind of academic community, at least in its Hungarian, Polish, and Serbian versions, and to some extent in its Czech variant, has been able to develop the elaboration of its own characteristics into theoretical significance.
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The rise of digital technology and social media as decisive factors in influencing public opinion has also highlighted the potential for innovative solutions to be widely adopted in election campaigns. In addition to disinformation, deepfake content is one of its manifestations and has the potential to mislead and deceive the public to an unprecedented degree. Manipulated recordings published during an election campaign can pose a serious threat to democratic public discourse. Not only do they violate a candidate's personal rights, they also mislead voters and undermine the integrity of the electoral process. While legal regulation seems to be a necessary solution to undermine confidence in the democratic institutional system and its legitimacy, its compatibility with the constitutional framework is often questionable. ■
Visszaugrás
