Dániel Hegedűs argues that the ineffective responses of the European institutions to the democracy and rule of law crisis was not the result of the deficiencies of the legal framework, but rather of the political settings, the institutional traditions, and the role concepts of the main European institutions, especially the European Commission. The Commission's lack of a constitutional mind-set, and its selective and superficial approach, resulted in only symbolic or procedural compliance with European values in Hungary's case. It overlooked the substantial violation of democracy and rule of law standards in the country. Furthermore, inter-institutional struggles, the ongoing conflict between the Commission and the Council over the monopoly of the legal interpretation of European values, and party-political bias aggravated the challenge and resulted in political deadlock.
Judit Zeller reviews the six-year mandate of the former commissioner for fundamental rights from two aspects: initiation of judicial review before the Constitutional Court and torture prevention in the UN framework. Under the new Fundamental Law of Hungary, the ombudsman plays a significant role in launching the judicial review of executive and legislative actions. The commissioner's inactivity in the field between 2013 and 2019, however, is striking. From 2015, operating the national preventive mechanism (NPM) under the UN OPCAT had been a new challenge for the commissioner. According to more in-depth analysis, both the structure and the functioning of the NPM needs further improvement to meet the requirements set out in the UN conventions and recommendations.
On the occasion of the 30th anniversary of Hungary's democratic transition we asked Alpár Losoncz and Levente Salat what has and what hasn't been achieved from the original ideas of the regime change. We have been curious about the possible internal and external reasons of the failures? What should have been done differently, and whether there is any causal relationship between the failures and the 'illiberal' turn, and there is a way back to the original ideas of 1989?
We have invited our authors from Serbia, Romania and Slovakia to write a reflection on the nature of the domestic constitutional complaint mechanism or on the problems arising from the lack of such mechanism from theoretical and practice-oriented perspectives.
Julia Ivan assesses the significance of the decision of the Court of Justice of the European Union in the cases of C-924/19. és 925/19. PPU ("the transit zone cases"). The Court ruled that the confinement to a closed area surrounded by barbed-wire, isolated from the population and guarded by the police amounted to detention. This conclusion is different from the one of the European Court of Human Rights in the case of Ilias and Ahmed v. Hungary. The Court also found that several provisions of the Hungarian asylum legislation violated EU law and confirmed that domestic courts are competent and entitled to refrain from the application of domestic law contradicting EU law under the principle of superiority of European law over na-
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tional laws, reinforcing the rights protection role of domestic courts. As a consequence, hundreds of detained asylum seekers and migrants were released from detention in June 2020.
In this column summaries of some of the recent decisions of the European Court of Human Rights and the Court of Justice of the European Union are presented.
András Kristóf Kádár reviews the Hungarian responses to the pressure from the European Court of Human Rights in the cases of prison overcrowding and related violations. He takes stock of the earlier legal framework, its advantages and problems, especially in its application and subsequent amendments. It was 2020 that marked a fundamental shift that seems to undermine earlier efforts to conform with European standards without the need for individual judgments in a large number of cases.
Gábor Mészáros reviews Catherine Dupré's book, The Age of Dignity - Human Rights and Constitutionalism in Europe, which with the decline of liberal democratic values becomes more and more relevant. ■
Visszaugrás
