The pandemic also changed the ordinary life of the legislative bodies: during the period of the public health emergency, on the one hand, the exact margin of movement of the parliaments during the period of the special legal order became uncertain, and on the other hand, the regular meetings encountered serious obstacles. A majority of the restrictions whave been left behind as the intensity of the pandemic decreased, but at the same time, many trends that developed at that time seem to be partly or entirely permanent. The impact of the Covid-19 epidemic on parliaments has already been examined by several authors, but the contribution of the constitutional review to the adaptation of legislative bodies to post-Covid challenges is a sub-field that has not yet been investigated. Two directions of the relevant constitutional case law can be separated: on the one hand, the decisions are aimed at delimiting the special legal powers of the parliaments, and on the other hand at identifying the framework for the day-to-day operation of the legislative bodies during the pandemic. In our study, we examine the role of the constitution/supreme courts in relation to the latter through recent French, German, Spanish, Croatian and Estonian constitutional/supreme court decisions.
Keywords: pandemic, parliamentary law, popular sovereignity, constitutional review, special legal order
Boldizsár Szentgáli-Tóth, senior research fellow, Centre for Social Sciences, Institute for Legal Studies, szentgali-toth.boldizsar@tk.hu.
Bettina Bor, project-research; Centre for Social Sciences, Institute for Legal Studies, bor.bettina@tk.hu.
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The election of members of the legislature is a cornerstone of the functioning of democratic states. The integrity of elections ensures the legitimacy of democratic functioning, and undermining it threatens the functioning of the state.
Hybridity is one of the most significant and complex security challenges of our time. Hybridity is a multi-level concept involving different levels of escalation. The broadest level of interpretation of the concept is significant for the topic under consideration: the hybrid threat. In this case, the possibility of military confrontation is remote, and in fact hybridity is then seen as a means of geopolitical competition. In this case, it means interfering with the democratic processes of the individual members of the opposing geopolitical community in order to provoke a domestic political crisis for a longer or shorter period of time, which would sufficiently tie up the resources of the state in question to enable the other side to pursue its geopolitical goals more effectively.
The effectiveness of this strategy is enhanced by cyberspace and related technologies. Thus, modern democratic elections are a particularly suitable arena for this, since in most states today either the whole or part of the electoral process is carried out through electronic systems.
The security of elections should be looked at in two ways here. One is the security and integrity of the electronic system itself through which elections are conducted. The security of electronic electoral systems is of paramount importance and they are therefore part of the state critical infrastructure. In recent years, there have been cyber-attacks on election information systems in a number of countries, in which the perpetrators have gained access to large amounts of personal data. The European Union has taken restrictive measures against attacks on public elections and the voting process, including the freezing of funds and economic resources.
Another aspect is the danger of disinformation scenarios by foreign states in connection with elections. Through this disinformation, the offending state creates doubts and uncertainty in society about the purity of the elections and the identity of the candidates, essentially delegitimising the outcome of the elections. Thus realising the basic objective of the Russian hybrid strategy of controlled chaos. Both NATO and the European Union have taken a number of measures to combat disinformation, but it is now abundantly clear that these will not be a real solution to the problem until social media platforms are genuinely engaged in this process, sharing their filtering mechanisms and cooperating with state authorities.
Keywords: hybridity, hybrid threat, election, network security, disinformation
Roland Kelemen, senior lecturer, Széchenyi István University, kelemen.roland@ga.sze.hu.
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"Can legislative drafting be deemed a scientific work?" asked Gábor Vladár in his address to the Academy in 1939. In his study he outlined a number of activities that are still being carried out in a similar way 80 years later - but today researches are rather focusing on the preparation and digitalisation of legislation, and on exploring its automation possibilities.
Nowadays, legislative drafting has become interdisciplinary, as in the internet, digitalization and automation era, legislation has long ceased to be drafted on paper, and instead of the printed version, the official text of the legislation is no longer the version published in printed form, but the version published in an electronically authenticated form. Therefore, codification lawyers, transcribers and typists have been replaced by computer scientists and project managers, because information superhighways generate a huge volume of information to work with in the legislation that would be very slow and almost impossible to process on paper.
In Hungary, a digitised system for lawmaking called "ParLex" was first launched in the Hungarian Parliament in 2017, followed by the Integrated Legislative System (IJR, 2021) that has made the legislative process from preparation to promulgation electronic, and extended it to the entire regulation-making process. Offering the possibility of broad public participation in lawmaking, the digitalisation of legislation would theoretically pave the way to involving voters at an earlier stage of legislation, thereby implying the possibility of achieving direct democracy.
In addition to legal digitalisation, we should also consider the use of AI-based text generators and whether they can be used in lawmaking over time. Machine-generated legislation necessarily has a linguistic dimension, since both law and legal norms are linguistic phenomena, and therefore, the automation of legislation cannot ignore the results of language technology.
Keywords: digitalisation, automation, Integrated Legislative System (hereinafter: IJR), ParLex, artificial intelligence
Ákos Kántor, PhD student, Doctoral School, Faculty of Law of the Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary, dr.kantor.akos@gmail.com
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