* * *
One
year ago, Hungary’s slide from a multiparty democracy into a one-party state
was all
over the headlines. The
European Union responded,
threatening sanctions. The Council of
Europe (keeper of the European Convention on Human Rights) repeatedly rapped
Hungary’s knuckles for violating
European norms on democracy and the rule of law. The United States expressed
concern. The forint
(Hungary’s currency) dramatically weakened, even against the weakening Euro.
One
year is a long time in politics and the current one-party Fidesz government has
simply waited out the storm. Sure
enough, the European Union has gone back to business as usual, even increasing
Hungary’s budget allocation. The
Council of Europe recently
certified that Hungary is now compliant with a number of European
standards. The US
is still concerned, but more
quietly. And the forint has started
to recover from its late 2011 spike against the Euro. It appears that Hungary is once again a normal
country – or at least a tolerated one.
The world has relaxed because the Hungarian government appeared
to modify some of the most offending reforms after pressure from the European
Union, particularly with regard to the appointment of judges and media
regulation. It also seemed that the Hungarian Constitutional Court was doing
its job to keep the government in line. Contrary
to all predictions (including mine), the Constitutional Court has spent the
last several months striking down many of the most worrisome laws passed by the
Fidesz government.
The Court declared unconstitutional the law that arbitrarily
lowered the
retirement age of judges. The Court
nullified the law that made it a
crime to be homeless in Hungary. The
Court quashed the requirement that students on state-provided financial aid remain
in the country after graduation. The
Court voided on technical grounds an earlier constitutional amendment that
handed power to the head of the National Judicial Office and to the chief public
prosecutor to assign any case to any court, extended the old statutes of
limitations for communist-era crimes, and established a new voter registration
scheme. And then the Court declared the
voter registration scheme substantively unconstitutional as well. Just
this week, the Court declared unconstitutional the law that banned
display of extremist symbols including the red star and the swastika,
following prior decisions from the European Court of Human Rights. And the Court declared
unconstitutional parts of the law that removed the official legal status
from more than 300 churches.
Even though the government had cut the jurisdiction of the Constitutional
Court, changed the system for electing judges, expanded the bench and packed it
with party loyalists, Court President Péter Paczolay has been able to
skillfully mobilize bare majorities to hand setbacks to the government. These strong decisions have honored basic
rights and defended important constitutional principles, often agreeing with
petitions sent to the Court by the surprisingly active Ombudsman Máté Szabó.
But the government is now seeking revenge for the various defeats
it has suffered by introducing into the Parliament a 15-page constitutional
amendment that reverses its losses. The
mega-amendment
is a toxic waste dump of bad constitutional ideas, many of which were
introduced before and nullified by the Constitutional Court or changed at the
insistence of European bodies. The new
constitutional amendment (again) kills off the independence of the judiciary,
brings universities under (even more) governmental control, opens the door to
political prosecutions, criminalizes homelessness, makes the recognition of
religious groups dependent on their cooperation with the government and weakens
human rights guarantees across the board.
Moreover, the constitution will now buffer the government from further financial
sanctions by permitting it to take all fines for noncompliance with the
constitution or with European law and pass them on to the Hungarian population
as special taxes, not payable by the normal state budget.
For good measure, the mega-amendment adds a new and nasty twist. It annuls all
of the decisions made by the Court before 1 January 2012 so that they have no
legal effect. Now, no one in the country
– not the Constitutional Court, not the ordinary courts, not human rights
groups or ordinary citizens – can rely any longer on the Court’s proud string
of rights-protecting decisions.
At one level, the nullification of all prior decisions of
the Constitutional Court makes sense:
old constitution, old decisions/new constitution, new decisions. But the current Constitutional Court had
already worked out a sensible new rule for constitutional transition by
deciding that in those cases where the
language of the old and new constitutions was substantially the same, the opinions
of the prior Court would still be valid.
Otherwise, where the new constitution was substantially different from
the old one, the previous decisions would no longer be used.
As a
result, the mega-amendment primarily vaporizes the cases that defined and
protected constitutional rights. Yes, the new constitution has a long list of
rights; most are the same in the new constitution as in the old
constitution. But the precise meanings of those rights were
specified in the Court’s decisions before 2012.
With those decisions gone, the same
extensive protection of rights is no longer guaranteed.
What is now up for grabs?
The abolition of the death penalty was accomplished by a
Court decision and is not explicitly prohibited by the new constitution. A
single personal identifier number that could link all government records on a
person was banned by a Court decision but is not explicitly banned in the new
constitution. The right to criticize public officials was protected by a Court
decision and is not explicitly included in the new constitution’s right to free
speech. Political neutrality of public
broadcasting was ensured through a Court decision but the new constitution does
not overtly guarantee it. Equal
recognition of same-sex civil unions was accomplished by a Court decision, but
now the constitution says that marriage must
be the union of a man and a woman (Constitution, Art. L). What happens to currently recognized same-sex
civil unions? Only a future Court
decision will say. Access to abortion
was limited under an old Court decision but the Court said that women’s rights
had to be weighed in the balance. Under
the new constitution, fetal life is protected from conception (Constitution,
Art. II) but women’s reproductive rights are not explicitly guaranteed. The freedom to create new churches was
guaranteed by Court decisions under the old constitution but is no longer ensured
in the new constitution. The right to receive
a public pension after a lifetime of mandatory contributions was guaranteed by a
Court decision, but it is not explicitly guarded under the new constitution. A decision of the old Court required that the
victims of both fascism and communism be treated equally in all reparations
schemes. That, too, is gone. And there is much, much more.
Yes, some of these rights are elaborated in decisions of the
European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). But
the Hungarian Parliament has expressed its disagreement with decisions of the
Strasbourg court before and last summer even passed
a resolution to defy the Court’s judgment in a recent case.
Of
course, nothing prevents the new Constitutional Court from issuing the very
same decisions again, without relying on their cases from prior years. But this is politically unlikely. The government will have named nine of the
fifteen judges of the Constitutional Court by April 2014, so we can guess how
that Fidesz-loyal majority will decide. So far, with the exception of Justice
Stumpf on some important issues, the new Fidesz judges have virtually always
supported the government’s position in constitutional matters. If the government decides that the new
constitution means something different from what the old Constitutional Court
said it did, we can expect the new Court to follow the government.
There’s more in the mega-amendment than the obliteration of
the prior jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court. The mega-amendment also restores policies that
the Court previously invalidated or that Hungary told Europe it had changed.
The
independence of courts takes a beating (again) in the mega-amendment. The head of the National Judicial Office
(Art. 14) is given the constitutionally entrenched power to take any legal case
and move it to a new court for decision.
Yes, readers of my prior
posts know that the government tried this before. The European Commission for Democracy
through Law (the Venice Commission) criticized the practice and the Hungarian
government modified the law on the judiciary to reduce the powers of the head
of the National Judicial Office. Now
political case assignment is back, but this time it is in the constitution, without the legal limitations that
the Hungarian government agreed to in order to satisfy the Venice
Commission.
The mega-amendment also empowers the head of the National
Judicial Office in ways that Hungary appeared to foreswear in its negotiations
with European bodies. The mega-amendment
(Art. 13) not only entrenches the position of the head of the National Judicial
Office in the constitution itself, but gives this office the power to “manage
the central administrative affairs of the courts,” a set of responsibilities in
which the judges merely “participate.” Europe
had required real involvement of judges in their own self-government and the
current phrasing of this power might make judicial self-government
unconstitutional because the power is assigned to someone else.
The lack of judicial independence had been criticized by
European bodies and the Hungarian government had appeared to back down. Now we see compromise was temporary and the bulked-up
powers of the head of the National Judicial Office are being added to the
constitution without the limitations that had reassured Europe.
The Council of Europe just gave Hungary a clean bill of
health on media regulation, but the mega-amendment adds more media restrictions. The mega-amendment says that during an
election campaign, public media must give free time to political advertisements. So far, so good. But, a cardinal law may restrict political
advertising in all other venues. Free
speech protections are usually at their strongest when used in the exercise of
democratic rights, and this amendment permits the limitation of free expression
precisely during electoral campaigns.
The mega-amendment kills off the independence of
universities. Almost all universities
in Hungary are public (as is true in most of Europe) but they largely self-governing. With the mega-amendment (Art. 6), the universities
come under direct political control as their financial management passes to the
government. Combine this with the provision in the new constitution (dating
back to communist times) that gave the President of the Republic the power to
appoint both university presidents and professors (Constitution Art 9(4)), and
universities can easily and constitutionally be put under political
control.
The freedom of students to move after university graduation is
also blocked under the mega-amendment. A Constitutional Court decision from
last year overturned the government’s policy of requiring students who received
state grants for their university education to stay in Hungary after graduation. But that is now explicitly overruled in the
mega-amendment (Art. 7).
Homeless people fare badly in the mega-amendment. Last year, the Constitutional Court ruled
that the government’s first attempt to criminalize homelessness violated the
human dignity of the homeless. But now
(Art. 8), the mega-amendment says that homelessness may be criminalized “in
order to preserve the public order, public safety, public health and cultural
values.”
Churches and other religious organizations, too, suffer
under the mega-amendment. Last year, the
government cancelled the legal status of more than 300 churches, leaving them
in a legal limbo. The churches that
attempted to recover their legal status were
routinely refused registration as ordinary civic organizations and one has
even had its property confiscated for now being illegal. Just this week the Constitutional Court
declared parts of the church law unconstitutional because it denied aspirant
churches a fair registration process. We
don’t yet know how the government will react to this but it would not be
surprising if the government just amended the constitution to overrule the
Court.
Under the mega-amendment, however, a new form of religious
organization is established, neither an official church nor a pure civic
organization, but instead an organization with a religious mission that collaborates
with the government in the public interest.
What happens to the churches that do not collaborate with the government
is not yet clear.
And that’s not all. Once
again, the government has lifted the statute of limitations so that it can
begin prosecutions for crimes committed during the communist period that were
not prosecuted for political reasons. The
Constitutional Court struck this down once before – but now it’s back. The amendment also announces as a
constitutional fact that the communist party and its associated groups were
“criminal organizations.” Those who were associated them are now responsible
for a long list of offenses including maintaining the regime, betraying the
nation, ending freedom of property, putting the country into debt, depriving
citizens of human rights, and undermining national identity. Though these offenses are not defined as
crimes, it is unclear just what the government plans to do with this new
demonization of old communists. The mega-amendment
states that the legal successors to the communist party share responsibility as
the inheritors of the wealth of the communist party. So parties currently in opposition – surely
the Socialists but perhaps others as well – are in the crosshairs of this
provision, with the details yet to come.
Why
does the government need a 15-page amendment to a 45-page constitution that
came into force only a little over a year ago?
The amendment reverses virtually all of the concessions that the
government has been forced to make over the last year, and it provides further evidence
that Prime Minister Viktor Orbán recognizes no limits on his power. When Europe tells him no and when his
country’s own Constitutional Court hands him defeats, he waits until Hungary is
out of the spotlight, and then he adjusts the constitution to make all those
unpleasant restrictions go away.
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