In this issue we publish the third part of the essay of János Kis on constioitional adjudication. In his writing, Kis applies the principles laid down in the first two parts of his article to the jurisprudence of the Hungarian Constitutional Court.
Kis emphasises that the Court found justified the moral reading of the Constitution in the field of fundamental rights and at the very beginning of its constitutional jurisprudence the Court held the critical revision of the text of the Constitution based on natural law to be allowed. According to the philosopher, the judges retumed back to the textual interpretation very early, however their view concerning social welfare became more radical, as a consequence of which in some cases the Court exceeded its power.
The article of Ruti Tettel focuses on the dilemmas of successor justice. Aecording to the author, the paradigm of justice established at Nuremberg and its vocabulary of international law, despite its shortcomings, continue to frame the successor justice debate. While within the national legal scheme, the question of justice seems inextricably political, from an international law perspective, the question of justice is somehow divorced from national politics. International law is thought to lift justice out of its politicised national context.
In the first interview of this issue, Gábor Halmai talks to János Kenedi about the difficulties of facing the past in Hungary. According to Kenedi, the main problem is the specific historical amnesia which has been a special character of Hungarians since the 1920s. Kenedi evaluates the process of lustration and he thinks that only that would mean a real compensation if the right to informational seif-determination would be almost absolute. At the end of the talk, János Kenedi argues for a new act on informational rights.
The second interviewer of the column is Sándor Striker, who talks to Timothy Garton Ash, professor at University of Oxford. The well-known historian, who is an expert of the history of Central and Eastern Europe, evaluates the different ways of political transition after the Soviet collapse. Ash is talking about the commissions set up to invesrigate past wrongs and he familiarises the reader with the experiences of the region in the field of lustration and transitional criminal justice. In the interviewee's opinion, the most effective way of facing the past is to make the documents of the totalitarian regime public, since the conclusions can be drawn from these materials is much more important then any legal procedure.
How could the Hungarian society face its own past? - the editors of Fundamentum put this questions to well-known public figures in Hungary. In this issue the answers of Gábor T. Szántó, Rudolf Ungváry, Zoltán Fleck and Endre Nagy appear. We hope that this selection of the different views can provide an interesting overview on how the intellectuals are thinking about the dilemmas of transitional justice.
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Last year the Supreme Court of Hungary adopted there decisions in which the Court annulled the judgements of the courts of first and second instance saying that the lower courts made a mistake when did not appry Article 3 of the Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War of August 12, 1949 to the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. In this column we publish one of the decisions of the Supreme Court with the commentaries of András Bargyova, Balázs József Gellér and Gábor Kardos focusing the question of whether the Revolution of 1956 was an armed conflict not of an international character.
Last year the Constitutional Court adopted its second decision on the constitutionality of some provisions of the Lustration Law. After that two parliamentary representatives proposed to amend the Law. The authors of the articles published in this column examine how the informational self-determination would be realised in a more effective way. László Varga, archivist gives an overview on what happened with the documents of the totalitarian state security. Katalin Kutrucz, vice-president of the Office of History summarises the main problems when interpreting the Lustration Law and the related Iegal regularions.
After decision we publish some recent judgements of the European Court of Human Rights especially on the limits of free expression. In addition, the reader can obtain summaries of some decisions of the Hungarian Constitutional Court mainly on human rights issues in the criminal proceedings. We also publish a part of a UNESCO report on the situation of the state security archives.
The writing of Géza Juhász, spokesman of the Habeas Corpus Working Group focuses on two cases. The accused in both cases is a homosexual person. The first case is about a homosexual policemen who was dismissed because of his sexual preference, the second is about a commissioned officer who worked for the State Security Office. It seems that the judges in both cases avoided to declare that these persons have a fundamental right to sexual selfdetermination,
In this issue of our quarterly, we publish recensions of recently published human rights publications. We introduce the book of Joel Feinberg on social philosophy, which was translated into Hungarian and published by Osiris. In addition, the reader can obtain the recensions of Mária Ludassy. Besides, we recomrnend our reader to obtain some recently published books on language rights and a Festschrift published for the 70th birthday of professor Antal Ádám. ■
Visszaugrás
