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Comments on Kim Lane Scheppele's Testimony
2013. április 30. 15:33
Though "not a blind supporter" of the current government, Dr. Janos Zlinszky, Jr. writes in his detailed comments that "What annoys me immensely, however, is when members of reputable academic institutions abuse their credit and mislead their audience 'verbo, opere et omissione.' 'The whole truth, nothing but the truth'...That is what I would expect a testimonoy coming from a Princeton scholar to be. It saddens me to see the contrary."
2013. április 30. 15:33
Kim Lane Scheppele, director of the program of Law and Public Affairs at Princeton University, has been one of the most outspoken critics of the recent legal changes adopted by the Hungarian Parliament in the past 3 years, including the new Fundamental Law. With the attention given to her criticism, her opinions merit a deeper analysis, regardless of whether one agrees with her or not. Following a recent guest article by Prof. Scheppele published in the New York Times, the US Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe held a hearing where Dr. Scheppele, along with other witnesses, expressed their views and findings regarding the Hungarian Constitution and rule of law in Hungary. However controversial the hearing may have been, Dr. Scheppele’s testimony carried influence, especially presenting herself as a professor at Princeton University and as an independent expert in 20th and 21st Century Hungarian legal and political history.
Janos Zlinszky, Jr., PhD, has been teaching Sustainable Development and Environmental Policy at the Faculty of Law and Political Science at Pázmány Péter Catholic University in Budapest, and other universities. Though originally educated as a biologist, J. Zlinszky, Jr. – who is not to be confused with his father, Prof. J. Zlinszky, lawyer emeritus and member of the Hungarian Constitutional Court between 1989 and 1998 – is no stranger to government and politics. He held senior positions at the Office of the President of Hungary, the Office of the Ombudsman for Future Generations, and as chair of EU working groups during the recent Hungarian Presidency of the EU. Asked by an expatriate relative to comment on the text of the testimony given by Prof. Scheppele, he took the time to analyze it in detail and comment. With his permission, we publish it here.
Below is the full testimony speech of Prof. Kim Lane Scheppele (in italics), followed by remarks from our guest author, Dr. J. Zlinszky, Jr. (in bold).
"I am honored to testify before you today. My name is Kim Lane Scheppele, and I am the Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs, as well as the Director of the Program in Law and Public Affairs, at Princeton University. I am also a Faculty Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.
Nearly twenty years ago, the US National Science Foundation gave me a grant to move to Hungary to study the Hungarian Constitutional Court, then the most impressive of the new courts in Eastern Europe. I planned to go for one year but stayed for four, working as a researcher at the Constitutional Court and serving as an expert advisor to the constitutional drafting committee of the Hungarian Parliament in 1995-1996, a position I occupied with the assistance of a second NSF grant. I am grateful to the NSF for having funded my research on Hungary, which documented how the new Hungarian constitution of 1989 put down roots and grew to support a vibrant Hungarian constitutional democracy. I have followed Hungarian constitutional developments closely ever since."
Zlinszky: Counting back from 2013, she must have arrived in Hungary around the time the Horn Government took power in 1994. It is well worth remembering that in those days the two parliamentary parties that formed a coalition government – the Hungarian Socialist Party (MSZP) and the Free Democrats (SZDSZ) - had a bigger majority of the votes in parliament than the present coalition, over 70%! In 1994, this post-communist government immediately started working on a new constitution, wishing to change the one designed at the opposition roundtable and enacted in 1989. They had the required majority and intended to use it. A new draft was produced, but at the end it was not put before parliament. The text of this draft (or drafts?) was difficult to come by. I saw one, which if enacted would have been a serious setback compared to the 1989 text. Rumor has it that the two coalition parties could not agree on the new text and, with elections looming, this prevented the change.
"I am here today because the current Hungarian government has felled the tree of democratic constitutionalism that Hungary planted in 1989.
Since its election in 2010, the Fidesz government has created a constitutional frenzy. It won two-thirds of the seats in the Parliament in a system where a single two-thirds vote is enough to change the constitution."
Zlinszky: It is true that Fidesz created a constitutional frenzy, but the two-thirds requirement for changing the constitution is no novelty. It has been in place since 1989 and also allowed the ruling coalition under the Horn Government – which, as just mentioned, held a parliamentary majority larger than the present governing parties – to enact sweeping changes in important laws.
"Twelve times in its first year in office, it amended the constitution it inherited. Those amendments removed most of the institutional checks that could have stopped what the government did next – which was to install a new constitution."
Zlinszky: Indeed, the number of times the constitution was amended was quite crazy. But it must also be mentioned here that it has happened before that the parliament did not like a judgment of the Constitutional Court and, insisting to have their way, MPs amended the constitution. This genie was let out of the bottle (i.e. this precedent was set) by the non-democratic parliament in 1989. Still, such occasions have been rare until now. It is a false statement, however that the government needed to change the existing constitution to accept a new one. Having won two-thirds, there was nothing to stop the parliament (not the government!) from enacting a new constitution. The amendments had nothing to do with paving way for a new constitution.
"The new Fidesz constitution was drafted in secret, presented to the Parliament with only one month for debate, passed by the votes of only the Fidesz parliamentary bloc, and signed by a President that Fidesz had named. Neither the opposition parties nor civil society organizations nor the general public had any influence in the constitutional process. There was no popular ratification. The Fidesz constitution went into effect on January 1, 2012."
Zlinszky: It is true that the normative text of the new Fundamental Law was drafted by a very small group, and published only early in 2011. Before that, in the summer of 2010, the Parliament set up a special committee to draft a concept paper for the new constitution in an open and participatory process. A lively discussion followed and contributions were offered from all sides and stakeholders. The resulting concept paper was completely neglected by the draft put before the parliament. At this point the opposition parties and many other stakeholders withdrew from the process.
However, speaking of a “Fidesz parliamentary bloc,” the witness consequently refuses to acknowledge the fact that in Hungary there is a coalition between FIDESZ and KDNP, the Christian Democrats. Nor is it a scandal, as she would seem to have her audience believe, that the president was nominated and then was elected by the votes of the parliamentary majority. The nomination and election of this president, Pal Schmitt, was no different from that of the previous ones. The witness’s context implies it was.
It is true there was no popular ratification of this Basic Law, as the new constitution is called, but that was not required for the former or the new constitution.
"While the government claims it was given a mandate to make major changes, the general Hungarian public thinks otherwise. During the election campaign in 2010, Fidesz never said it would change the whole constitutional system. Once the Fidesz governing program became clear after the party came to power, the popularity of Fidesz has plummeted, even more so after the government undertook to replace the constitution."
Figure 1: Political Party Popularity in Hungary 2008-2013
Source: Ipsos/Portfolio.hu.
"After the April 2010 election, Fidesz’s popularity has steadily dropped. But none of the other parties – the MSzP (Socialists), Jobbik (far-right party), LMP (Politics Can be Different, a liberal/green/youth party) or the new liberal electoral coalition Egyutt 2014 (Together 2014) – is any more popular. Surveys show that 50% or more of Hungarian voters say that there is no political party that they support."
Zlinszky: It is generally known that, to put it mildly, many businesses have political connections in Hungary, and polling companies are no exceptions. One consequence of this is that every political party has their preferred polling company, who mostly come up with data more favorable to the respective party’s claims than the other companies’ poll. Ipsos, the firm whose poll is quoted here by the witness, is commonly known as one of the SzDSz-friendly and Fidesz-hostile companies.
In the labeling of Hungarian parties, some would argue that MSZP is post-communist, not socialist, in the Western or traditional sense of the term. It might also be important for the reader to mention that “Együtt 2014” is a breakaway party from the former MSZP-led government, as is the “Democratic Coalition” which is not included in this poll. From a political scientist, one would also have expected a reminder that governing parties regularly lose support after they start governing, so the loss of support is not really a surprise at all, nor can it be easily derived from or connected to, one concrete political action. Still, it is true in general terms that by now the share of the population not choosing any of the parties is of a hitherto unprecedented proportion, signaling alienation from politics in general.
"Even though the government pushed through a one-party constitution without support from any other political fraction, except its own party-list partner the Christian Democrats, this didn’t stop the constitutional juggernaut. The government has amended its new constitution four times in 15 months. Each time, the government has done so with the votes of only its own political bloc, rejecting all proposals from the political opposition or from civil society groups. The current Hungarian constitution remains a one-party constitution."
Zlinszky: It is true that the constitution has been amended four times in 15 months, but it was the Parliament (not the Government) that pushed through the changes. It is a grave mistake from a professional to use the term interchangeably. One would expect more precision from Princeton. Therefore, the question is not how many parties support a law, or how many parties support the new constitution. The question is how many MPs support it. This is the case in any democratic system running under the rule of law. If a piece of law has the required majority in parliament, it is passed. Nor is it a surprise that the opposition votes against proposals from the governing parties.
True, for the constitution it would be much better in the long run if there were a wide agreement about it, a foundation of support that the 1989 text did have.
"Just last week, the Fidesz government passed a 15-page amendment to the new 45-page constitution. László Sólyom, the conservative former president of both the Constitutional Court and the Republic of Hungary, said in a public statement last week that the “Fourth Amendment” removes the last traces of separation of powers from the Hungarian constitutional system. Under the constitution as amended, no institution has the legal right to check many of the key powers of the one-party government."
Zlinszky: Yes, and this is the very problem Kim Lane Scheppele ought to talk about. It is not that the ruling coalition breaks positive law, the letter of law. It breaks the spirit of law, e.g. by weakening the separation of powers. Of course, talking about “last traces” is probably overstating it, but weakening they do.
"The Fourth Amendment nullifies more than 20 years of rights-protecting case law of the Hungarian Constitutional Court that had been developed before the new (2011) constitution went into effect. This leaves a giant gap where firm legal protection of basic rights once stood. The Fourth Amendment specifically overturns nearly all of the decisions that the Constitutional Court made in the last year striking down controversial new laws the Fidesz government had passed. The Fourth Amendment removes the Court’s power to evaluate on substantive grounds any new constitutional amendments, a move which allows the government to escape review by inserting any controversial new proposal directly into the constitution. The Fourth Amendment entrenches political control of the judiciary and gives the government new tools to prevent the opposition from coming to power. The Fourth Amendment reverses many of the concessions Hungary made last year when the European Union, the Council of Europe and the US State Department criticized fundamental aspects of that constitution.
Under cover of constitutional reform, the Fidesz government has given itself absolute power. It now has discretion to do virtually anything it wants, even if civil society, the general public, and all other political parties are opposed."
Zlinszky: The Fourth Amendment doesn’t nullify the “case laws” that had been developed before the new constitution went into effect in 2011. It only says that they are no longer binding. But of course nothing prevents the Constitutional Court from passing the same ruling as before in similar cases.
The Court never had an explicit right to evaluate any new constitutional amendments on substantive grounds. On the contrary, the Court itself ruled in an early case (though not unanimously) that they would never review the text of the constitution, only legislation based on, derived from, or implementing the constitution.
Again, the question is how many MPs support a law, not how many parties, as in any democratic system running under the rule of law.
Kim Lane Scheppele would also have her audience believe that the Government (as opposed to Parliament) was given some new rights by the amendment, which it obviously wasn’t. The chief officials of the judiciary and the prosecution have (for the past 20 years) always been elected by parliament. Government, actually the PM, is elected by the same parliament. Under the Hungarian system, which was modelled on the German one, a group of MPs with a two-thirds majority have sweeping legislative powers. This is nothing new. It is not the result of the present amendments. Nor do these amendments provide “new tools to prevent the opposition from coming to power.” The ruling coalition is far from being guaranteed a second term if the electorate decides otherwise.
"How could Hungary have fallen so far so fast from the family of stable constitutional democracies? The answer lies in the Achilles’ heel of the old constitutional system: a disproportionate election law combined with an easy constitutional amendment rule.
Hungary’s 1990 election law gave disproportionate numbers of seats to the winner of an election, a feature that was designed to help plurality parties form stable governments. When Fidesz got 53% of the vote in the 2010 election, the election law converted this victory into 68% of the seats in the Parliament. While Fidesz won this vote in a joint party list with the Christian Democrats (the KDNP), the Christian Democrats barely have an independent existence apart from Fidesz and its members vote in a bloc with Fidesz on every issue."
Zlinszky: It is true that the Christian Democrats vote in a bloc with Fidesz and rarely do we hear about independent initiatives from KDNP. Also, it is true that the 1990 election law was intentionally formed so that the winning party is awarded with “extra” seats to form a stable government. Notably, the first political group to benefit from this system was the 1994 post-communist, liberal government, which governed during the years that Prof. Scheppele spent in Budapest. She did not find the system so absurd then.
Figure 2: Composition of the Hungarian Parliament 2010
Source: Hungarian National Election Commission
Translation:
The Fidesz/KDNP joint party list (orange) received 52.7% of the vote, 263 of the seats and 68.1% of the Parliament. MSzP (Socialists) (red) received 19.3% of the vote, 59 of the seats and 15.3% of the Parliament. Jobbik (far-right party) (dark green) received 16.6% of the vote, 47 of the seats and 12.2% of the Parliament and LMP (Politics Can be Different) (light green) received 7.7% of the vote, 16 of the seats and 4.1% of the Parliament. There was one independent MP.
"Armed with its two-thirds supermajority, the Fidesz government has been able to make use of the old constitution’s amendment rule, dating to the communist constitution of 1949, which permitted the constitution to be changed with a single two-thirds vote of the Parliament. This “magic two-thirds” has enabled Fidesz to make all of its constitutional changes in a formally legal manner. Only one barrier remained: In 1995, under a prior two-thirds government, the old constitution was amended to require a four-fifths vote of the Parliament before any new constitutional drafting process could begin. One month into its term, Fidesz used its two-thirds vote to amend the constitution to remove the four-fifths requirement."
Zlinszky: The professional expression would not be “supermajority” but “qualified majority.” But much more importantly, the proper reference is not 1949 but 1989 when mentioning the new (2011) constitution’s predecessor, especially when talking about the two-thirds majority. This provision was inserted during the full revision of the constitution during the 1989 reform, but Dr. Scheppele makes it sound like it was a rule made under the Soviet oppression and communism.
True that this law allows Fidesz to amend and change the constitution, but one should not forget that Fidesz is not the first party to change laws requiring a two-thirds majority, even parts of the constitution, and the “magic two-thirds” came from the electorate.
"Many of the laws, including the constitution itself, many of the constitutional amendments and most of the cardinal laws, were introduced through the parliamentary procedure of a “private member’s bill,” which bypasses the stage of public consultation required of all government bills. That, combined with the fact that the Parliament instituted a new rule through which a two-thirds vote could cut off parliamentary debate on any topic, has meant that most of these new laws have received very little public discussion. It has not been uncommon for a constitutional amendment go from first proposal to final enactment in just a few weeks.
Taken over three years, the constitutional changes are complicated, detailed, and spread out across a new constitution, four major constitutional amendments, dozens of “cardinal” (super-majority) laws, and thousands of pages of ordinary laws that were all passed in a giant legislative blur, sometimes in the middle of the night. I strongly suspect that most Hungarians do not understand the details of this new constitutional system. Even Hungarian lawyers are not able to keep up with the total revolution in the law. In what follows, I will try to explain how the new system of Hungarian government is structured, current as of March 15, 2013, taking all of this new law into account."
Zlinszky: Bypassing public participation and a horizontal scrutiny of government departments using the loopholes of members` drafts and exceptional procedure was common practice under the Socialist Gyurcsany and Bajnai Governments, before 2010. From the vantage point of the ombudsman`s office, I witnessed law amendments introduced in the morning hours and voted that same evening. This is no excuse for Fidesz to continue with the practice, but fairness requires it should be mentioned.
It is true that legislation is hasty, amendments were accepted in just a few weeks and Fidesz is rightly criticized for that. But I doubt that a proper, slower, more thorough, normal process would have avid, alert, and expert followers from the general public. My experience shows that most Hungarians do not understand their new Fundamental Law any less than they understood the previous Constitution. They do just as fine (or as bad) as do the majority of citizens of other countries when it comes to understanding their own highest level legislation.
"The primary source for my testimony is the Magyar Közlöny, the official gazette of the Hungarian government that publishes all of the laws. From my perch in the United States, I cannot say how the laws are being carried out. But I can say how the laws are structured and what they do and do not permit. I will call this whole new legal structure the “Fidesz constitution” even though not everything is in the single constitutional text or its amendments. Many elements of the system I describe are in two-thirds “cardinal” laws that are almost as entrenched as the constitution itself, which is why I don’t make the fine distinctions here except where they are crucial for understanding how the system works. I am happy to provide detailed legal citations for all of the claims I make below if you are interested in checking more precisely what I say or precisely where in the law each of these statements can find support."
Zlinszky: Now, does the requirement of a two-thirds vote mean entrenchment, or not? Earlier Kim Lane Scheppele bemoaned how “easy” it is under the Hungarian system for a “mere” two-thirds majority to amend the constitution. Now she says that laws requiring a two-thirds majority are entrenched. You cannot have it both ways.
It would have been very useful if she provided up front the citations she claims to be happy to provide, like anybody coming from academic circles should and would do. Footnotes serve this function well.
"Others who are providing testimony for this hearing will address other crucial issues raised by the current Hungarian government’s actions over the last three years. They will address the fate of civil liberties, the difficult situation for many churches in Hungary and the growing and increasingly virulent strains of anti-Semitism and anti-Roma agitation that have occurred alongside this constitutional revolution.
My remit at this hearing today is to talk about something altogether more boring, but no less important: the system of divided and checked powers necessary for a government to remain both constitutional and democratic. History tells us that a government that has no limits on what it can do and that concentrates all powers in a single party will soon cease to be either constitutional or democratic."
Zlinszky: The Government was elected democratically and won two-thirds of the mandates. If a law - be it the constitution - has the required majority in parliament, it is passed, just like in any democratic system. Given that situation, a group of MPs with a two-thirds majority have sweeping legislative powers.
"The importance of checked and limited powers was an insight very familiar to the American constitutional framers. The Philadelphia Convention did not even include a bill of rights in the US Constitution because the framers believed that the most effective protection for rights was a government that was limited by law. While American history has taught us that a bill of rights matters – and the ratification process of the US Constitution insisted on including one – we have also learned much from Princeton graduate James Madison, who wrote in Federalist #47: “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”
By James Madison’s definition, Hungary is on the verge of tyranny.
In what follows, I will show that the Fidesz political party has gathered all of the powers of the Hungarian government into its own hands, without checks from any other political quarter and without any limits on what it can do."
Zlinszky: I would be much more cautious with citing James Madison here. His definition squarely places the Horn Government of 1994 to 1998, when MSzP/SzDSz had their “supermajority,” on the verge of tyranny, too. Kim Lane Scheppele was in Hungary during that time and apparently had no qualms then.
This repetitive situation is mostly due to the characteristics of a system, widely used in other democracies as well, where the selection and election of every person in a high “checks-and-balances-and-parallel-powers” position rests with parliament. This is hardly a sign of tyranny, it is a result of the system. I am not saying it is an optimal system, but it is far from being unique to Hungary.
"We should start with the basics: Hungary has a unicameral parliamentary system of government. A unicameral Parliament has no upper house to check what the lower house does, no “Senate” to complicate life for the “House of Representatives” and vice versa. A parliamentary system means that the most powerful executive, the prime minister, is elected by the Parliament rather than directly by the people. As a result, the prime minister in Hungary is virtually guaranteed a majority for all of his legislative initiatives because that legislative majority put him into his job. Not surprisingly, the legislative-executive cooperation guaranteed in Hungary’s unicameral parliamentary system dates back to the communist constitution of 1949. (From the mid-19th to the mid-20th centuries, Hungary had a bicameral parliament.)"
Zlinszky: It should be mentioned, that many other democracies (i.e. Sweden, Denmark, Liechtenstein, Luxemburg, Portugal) have unicameral parliamentary systems. In the United States, for instance, many sub-national entities have unicameral legislatures as well. Kim Lane Scheppele forgets to remind her audience that the system they are used to – the US system - is a rather rare exception among democracies. In most countries, the PM is elected by Parliament. In some others, the PM is appointed by the President, but requires parliamentary support for his or her work. The US system is a stand-alone, old system for a federal state.
The prime minister in Hungary is granted a majority for his legislative initiatives, just like the prime minister in Austria, Germany, Britain, Sweden, etc. Again, in nasty phrasing, Professor Scheppele makes it sound like these rules date back to the Communist dictatorship and would mean a living connection with it. But in reality, these rules come from the reformed system of 1989. It is absurd anyway to waste time with contemplating “legislative-executive cooperation” guaranteeing anything in a communist setting. Between 1948 and 1988 it was the Red Army occupying Hungary and their communist puppets at every important post whose brute force “guaranteed cooperation.” It was not any piece of law. Laws were irrelevant. What was relevant was the unwritten but expressed will of the Party.
"In 1989, however, major constitutional changes in Hungary added a number of checks to this basic framework. A Constitutional Court was created as the primary watchdog on the majoritarian dangers of a unicameral parliamentary system. Unlike a Supreme Court which is the highest court of appeal in the legal system (something we are familiar with in the United States), a Constitutional Court is the only court that is allowed to hear and decide constitutional questions – and it does nothing elsebesides rule on constitutional matters. Because the Hungarian Constitutional Court conducts the primary oversight in a system that has little formal separation of legislative and executive power, it is even more important than the Supreme Court in the American separation-of-powers system."
Zlinszky: Saying that a “number of checks” were added to the legal framework in 1989 is utterly misleading, since it did not merely “add a number of checks,” but it created and launched a new system altogether, a democratic system to replace the communist dictatorship! A new chapter has begun.
Contrary to the last sentence in the paragraph above, the legislative and executive have all the formal separation. It is just that de facto they are very connected, one depending on the other. In addition to the American system of parliament, government, and courts, the Hungarian system has the Constitutional Court, and has a president as head of state, two additional, important players. But these too are voted in by parliament. Political rotation is helped by the difference in times of office of the different officials (shortest for MPs), thus ensuring that different parliaments will add members to other checks-and-balances institutions.
"Given such weighty responsibility in the 1989 constitutional design, the Constitutional Court was made highly accessible to the new democratic public in Hungary. Literally, anyone could ask the Constitutional Court to review a law for constitutionality using a so-called actio popularis petition. As a result, virtually every law was challenged. From the time it opened in January 1990, the active Constitutional Court kept each new government under constitutional constraint regardless of the political leanings of the government. Opinion polls showed that the Constitutional Court was consistently the most highly respected political institution in Hungary.
The procedure for electing judges to the Constitutional Court before 2010 prevented the Court from being captured by any one political fraction. Because each judicial nominee to the Constitutional Court had to first be approved by a majority of parliamentary parties before then being elected to the Court by a two-thirds vote of the Parliament, the Court always had a balance of different political views represented on the bench."
Zlinszky: It is true that the wide possibility given by action popularis used to be a very important gate to remedy, and this is now taken away. It is also true that the Constitutional Court is consistently the most highly respected political institution in Hungary. But it has not always been politically “balanced,” That balance tilted from time to time in the past.
"Other changes that were made to the constitutional system in 1989 provided more checks on Hungary’s unicameral parliamentary government. Revamped parliamentary procedure required extensive consultation with both civil society and opposition parties before government bills could be put to a vote. Important issues of constitutional concern required a two-thirds vote of the Parliament. As we have seen, however, the private member’s bill procedure allowed the consultation stage for legislation to be bypassed and the two-thirds laws could cease to be a real check on power when the government had two-thirds of the parliamentary seats, something the disproportionate election law made quite likely.
Four ombudsmen added after 1989 to the system of rights protection. Other independent institutions – the central bank, state audit office, prosecutor general’s office, national election commission and media board – provided both expertise and additional checkpoints. For example, both the national election commission and the media board were structured to ensure representation from across the political spectrum. An independent self-governing judiciary ensured that the laws were fairly applied."
Zlinszky: Well, “quite likely” is hardly true for the two-thirds majority. Out of six post-communist governments, only two had this backing! As I had to mention many times, Hungary has seen a two-thirds majority government once before due to the election law, with the same powers of the Parliament between 1994 and 1998. No one cried tyranny then.
Praising the earlier rights protection setup, Dr. Scheppele “forgets” to mention that between 1990-2012 the president, who was elected by Parliament, nominated the ombudsmen. The Chief Prosecutor, Head of Audit Office, President of National Bank were all elected by Parliament, and the President of the National Election Board was appointed by the PM. By the way, who appoints the Supreme Court judges in the U.S.? For how long do they hold office?
"There were so many different checks instituted after 1989 on the power of the prime minister and his parliamentary majority that the post-1989 constitutional system worked reliably to ensure that the operation of majoritarian political power didn’t ride roughshod over democratic guarantees and constitutional limitations."
Zlinszky: This a completely unprofessional paragraph, a mere emotional outburst, lacking any concrete examples of the “many different checks.”
"By contrast with this robust system of complementary powers, the new “Fidesz constitution” removes virtually all of the checks added to the prior communist constitution after 1989. I will detail the major reversals here.
Under the Fidesz constitution, the Constitutional Court’s power and independence have been compromised in multiple ways. The system for electing constitutional judges was changed so that now a single two-thirds vote of the Parliament is sufficient to put a judge on the Court, abolishing the multiparty agreement that was once necessary for nomination. The Fidesz constitution also expanded the number of judges on the Court from 11 to 15, giving the governing party four more judges to name immediately.
Between changing the process for electing judges and expanding the number of judges to be elected, Fidesz government has been able to select nine of the 15 judges on the Court in its first three years in office. The Fidesz parliamentary bloc, voting in unison as it always does, put these judges onto the Court without multiparty support, though a few of the new judges were able to garner some votes from the far-right Jobbik party. The new constitutional judges have almost always voted for the Fidesz government position in each case. Some of the new judges have just voted for the government’s position without even giving reasons."
Zlinszky: Yes, the court`s independence was compromised. For instance (Scheppele does not mention this) the right to elect their own president was taken away from the judges and given to parliament. But the court has not yet become a robot. Surprisingly, many of the new judges who were indeed Fidesz politicians before, once in the Constitutional Court, ruled against many Fidesz-initiatives and laws. Also, the Constitutional Court system does not require that all judges put forward a separate justification for their vote. They may, if they want to, but are not obliged to do so. So this is again misleading.
"Even if the Court is in Fidesz-friendly hands, however, a powerful Court might still be dangerous to a government that shuns checks on its freedom of action. This may explain why the jurisdiction of the Court has been cut. The Court no longer has the power to review laws based on “actio popularis” petitions, which are petitions that anyone can file. Now, the only individuals who can challenge laws must show that they have been concretely injured by the application of a potentially unconstitutional law and that they have exhausted their remedies in the ordinary courts. If the Constitutional Court can only hear cases that have concrete victims, it is hard for the Court to rule on matters pertaining to separation of powers and the structure of democratic institutions. Individuals rarely get “standing” to challenge a law that creates a new system for judicial appointments or a law that gives a government agency the power to issue decrees without parliamentary oversight, both laws that have been passed since Fidesz came to power. Some elements of “abstract review” remain with the Constitutional Court, but these, too, have been restricted."
Zlinszky: The loss of “actio popularis” is a great loss indeed. However, this has little to do with the question of whether the Court can rule on issues of separation of powers…
As noted already, leaders of the judiciary and the prosecution were always elected by parliament, and so was the PM, and still are. These matters are regulated within the constitution, and the Court (by its own interpretation and decision!) has jurisdiction only over the laws derived from the constitution, not on the constitution per se.
"Abstract review allows the Court to hear challenges to laws without a concrete dispute before it. With the exception of the Parliamentary Commissioner for Human Rights (who will himself be replaced by Fidesz parliamentary majority later this year), the constitution gives the power to challenge laws abstractly only to particular offices that are currently occupied by people affiliated with Fidesz. One might guess that Fidesz appointees do not have a strong incentive to limit the power of their own government. While one-quarter of the Parliament is also given the power to challenge a law at the Constitutional Court, the one-third of the seats in the current Parliament that are not held by the governing party are divided between parties of the center-left and a party of the far right, who would have to agree on a challenge, something that is not very likely. As a result, many laws have been effectively insulated from constitutional challenge by the way that abstract review power has been designed."
Zlinszky: As I already pointed out, many of the Fidesz-affiliated new judges ruled against Fidesz initiatives and laws. Obviously, the proportion of the seats in the Parliament obtained by other parties can hardly be a subversive conspiracy by Fidesz. Again, as in 1994, two-thirds of MPs have the right to elect officials. This is nothing new or strange in the Hungarian system. Two coalition governments had this majority behind them and four did not.
"Even with the limitations on access to the Constitutional Court that were built into the Fidesz constitution, the system of judicial review in Hungary may seem broader than the system we have in the United States. Therefore, the dangers of the new system in Hungary may not be apparent to an American eye. Limiting the power to initiate judicial review only to those who have been directly injured and only to officials who owe their jobs to this government limits the ability of the Court to reach constitutional violations that it used to be able to reach. The US Supreme Court cannot reach all constitutional violations either, but the United States has a bicameral Congress, a separately elected president, a vigilant and active civil society, and federalism, which adds state governments and state courts as additional checks on the power of temporary majorities. Hungary has none of those checking institutions and so relies on the Constitutional Court to carry more weight in the constitutional system. Making it difficult for this Court to reach all constitutional violations creates blind spots in which unconstrained political discretion can override constitutional values."
Zlinszky: Hungary indeed has a broader system of judicial review than the United States. Furthermore, if the President, the Senate majority and the House majority are from the same party, no one cries tyranny or tragedy and probably no one should. It shows a good sense of humor to blame Hungary (a country, slightly larger than the state of Maine and slightly smaller than Indiana) for not having federalism…
"In addition to limiting access to the Court, the Fidesz constitution restricts the jurisdiction of the Court in other ways as well. The Court may no longer review any law that deals with taxes or budgets when those laws are passed at a time when the national debt is more than 50% of GDP. Under the Fourth Amendment passed last week, the Court will never have the power to review budget and tax laws that were passed under these circumstances. As a result, if a tax law passed this year infringes an individual’s constitutionally guaranteed property rights or if such a tax is applied selectively to particular minority groups, there is nothing that the Constitutional Court can do – in perpetuity. This opens up a space for the government to violate many personal rights without any constitutional oversight."
Zlinszky: This is false. The Constitutional Court can review everything that causes violations to human rights. So if tax or budget laws do so, the Court is able to move.
(Also, it would be more accurate to point out that it is the Constitutional Court that is mentioned here as opposed to the courts generally, the judiciary.)
"The Fourth Amendment has also banned the Court from reviewing constitutional amendments for substantive conflicts with constitutional principles. As a result, if the constitution promises freedom of religion but a constitutional amendment requires a two-thirds parliamentary vote before a church is officially recognized (a provision that was added to the constitution with the Fourth Amendment), the Court can do nothing about this. Or if the constitution says anyone may freely express her opinion but an amendment says that no one may defame the Hungarian nation (a provision that was also added to the constitution with the Fourth Amendment), there is nothing the Court can do. These examples show that the government can now directly amend the constitution any time it thinks the Constitutional Court might strike down some policy that the government wants to enact regardless of how much these new amendments violate principles that have been guaranteed elsewhere in the constitution. In fact, the Fourth Amendment already puts back into the constitution laws that the Constitutional Court has already struck down as unconstitutional once before under the new constitution."
Zlinszky: We already talked repeatedly about the distinction between ruling about legislation derived from the constitution as opposed to ruling on the constitution’s text itself.
Freedom of religion – the freedom to exercise and teach one`s beliefs – has nothing to do with the question of whether the state recognizes a religious group as a church in the legal sense. However, this decision on whether a group fulfills the legal requirements needed for the status of a recognized church or not ought not be with Parliament but with the judiciary, as the Constitutional Court pointed out.
The practice of making an unconstitutional act or process constitutional by inserting it into the text of the constitution is a sad one, and a grave mistake. However, it is far from being a Fidesz invention. The first such precedent already happened in 1989, right after one of the first rulings of the new Constitutional Court. The parliament that let this genie out of the bottle was the last communist parliament and government under Miklos Nemeth. The next one under the 1994-98 Horn (MSZP) Government followed suit. Kim Lane Scheppele was in Hungary at that time. What did she think about it then? Still, the continuation of this practice by Fidesz is indefensible.
"To make matters worse, the Fourth Amendment also nullifies all decisions made by the Constitutional Court before the new constitution took effect. At one level, this makes sense: old constitution, old decisions/new constitution, new decisions. But the Constitutional Court had already worked out a sensible new rule for the 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 and could still be applied. Otherwise, where the new constitution was substantially different from the old one, the previous decisions would no longer be used. Constitutional rights are key provisions that are the same in the old and new constitutions – which means that, practically speaking, the Fourth Amendment annuls primarily the cases that defined and protected constitutional rights. With those decisions gone, no one can say for certain whether Hungarian law protects free speech, freedom of religion, equality of all Hungarians before the law, property rights, and virtually every other right in precisely the way that everyone in Hungary had come to take for granted."
Zlinszky: The Fourth Amendment does not nullify all decisions made by the Constitutional Court before the new constitution took effect. It lifts their obligatory character for the future. The official text says: “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 and should still be applied.” There’s a big difference between could and should. Though I personally do deeply disagree with this strange amendment, it is utterly false and misleading for Prof. Scheppele to conclude that from now on, the official text does not mean what it says.
"What other checks on Fidesz’s untrammeled power have now been removed in the Fidesz constitution? The independence of the ordinary judicial system has taken a big hit. In 2011, the Fidesz government suddenly lowered the judicial retirement age from 70 to 62, thus removing the most senior 10% of the judiciary, including 20% of the Supreme Court judges and more than half of the appeals court presidents. Both the Hungarian Constitutional Court and the European Court of Justice found that the sudden change in the judicial retirement age was illegal."
Zlinszky: The reason for finding the provisions on the judicial retirement age unconstitutional was because the transition was too sudden, not because of the set retirement age itself.
"The government’s first reaction was to defy both courts’ judgments, before finally agreeing at the end of 2012 to reinstate fired judges who wanted to return to their jobs. In the meantime, however, all of the court leadership positions were filled with new judges, so the old judges who wanted to be reinstated were returned to much less important positions. Through this move, the government was able to replace much of the top leadership of the judiciary in a single year. One court leader who could not have been replaced in this manner (because he was too young) was the then-President of the Supreme Court, András Baka. He was removed from office when the new constitution went into effect because of a new requirement, effectively immediately, that judges must have five years of judicial experience in Hungary before being named to the Supreme Court (newly renamed the Curia). President Baka’s 16 years of experience as a judge on the European Court of Human Rights did not count."
Zlinszky: The requirement of five years judicial experience in Hungary is hardly an illogical one. Still, the removal of Baka was far from elegant, to say the least.
"How were the new judges named? The new president of the Supreme Court/Curia was elected by a two-thirds vote of the Fidesz Parliament. Beyond that, a new institution was created to oversee the appointment of all other judges as well as the administration of the judiciary: the National Judicial Office. This office replaced a system of judicial self-government. The president of the NJO, elected by two-thirds of the Parliament, has the power to hire, fire, promote, demote and discipline all judges in the system without any substantive oversight from any other institution. The national President has to countersign in cases where a judge is appointed for the first time in the system, but it is not clear he could refuse to do so. The new leadership of the ordinary courts has thus been replaced by judges who owe their careers to an official elected by the “magic two-thirds” of the Fidesz Parliament."
Zlinszky: Of course there is no such thing as the “Fidesz parliament,” no more than there would be a “Republican Congress” of the USA. This is a play on emotions. The NJO’s institution is visibly independent, as Ms. Scheppele points out correctly. Is that a problem now? There is nothing “magic” about the two-thirds majority.
"The Council of Europe’s Commission on Democracy through Law (the Venice Commission) sharply criticized the extraordinary powers of and general lack of legal standards governing the president of the National Judicial Office. The US State Department has also raised questions about the independence of the judiciary under this system. In a concession to criticism, the Fidesz government agreed to limit the powers of the president of the NJO in legislation passed in summer 2012. But with the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, those concessions are clawed back. The constitution now entrenches the National Judicial Office (NJO), whose president has the constitutional power to “manage the central administrative affairs of the courts,” a set of responsibilities in which the judges merely “participate.” None of the constraints that the Fidesz government agreed to under international pressure – requiring a significant role for the judges in their own self-government, establishing legal standards for the president of the NJO to use in managing the judiciary, and no longer allowing the president of the NJO to stay in office until her successor is elected – are in the constitution itself. In fact, the concessions that the Fidesz government made to Hungary’s international critics may be unconstitutional now that the Fourth Amendment gives the sole power to manage the courts without these constraints to the president of the National Judicial Office."
Zlinszky: I don’t like repeating myself, but I’m forced to do so. Once again, who appoints the Supreme Court judges in the US? For how long do they hold office? Are they entrenched?
"In another move that has attracted universal criticism, the Fidesz government gave the president of the National Judicial Office the power to take any case in the entire court system and move it to a court different from the one to which normal procedure would assign it. So, for example, if a political corruption case against members of the main opposition party would normally be assigned to the trial-level court in Pest, the president of the National Judicial Office can move the case to Kecskemét. In fact, this is not a hypothetical; that very example has already happened. The rationale given for this extraordinary power to move cases is that the courts are overcrowded and case resolution can be speeded up by moving cases to less crowded courts."
Zlinszky: The MSzP governments were utterly corrupt as is unfortunately common in emerging democracies, but that scandalous corruption itself did not seem to disturb democracy advocates then. Moving their trial does…Besides, the courts are overcrowded indeed. Alas, corruption did not seem to improve yet either.
"But this rationale is belied by the facts: From public sources, I have been keeping track of the movement of these cases in the first year that the president of the NJO has had this power. She has moved only a few dozen cases away from courts that have thousands of backlogged cases. And she has moved the cases not to the least crowded courts in the countryside but to other courts that also have backlogs. She has moved some of the most high-profile political cases in which the political opposition has a stake, leading the opposition to charge the government with picking the judges particularly in cases that have strong political overtones. While my statistics cannot reveal the motivation of the government, they can show that the government is not moving a substantial enough number of cases to make a difference in waiting times and it is not moving cases from the most to the least crowded courts. I am happy to make the data available upon request.
With the Fourth Amendment passed last week, the power of the president of the NJO to move any case to any court in the country is entrenched in the constitution itself. And the constitution does not include the legal constraints that Hungary agreed to under pressure. Giving power to the president of the NJO to select which court handles individual cases outside the rules of ordinary legal procedure is for many – myself included – the end of the rule of law in Hungary."
Zlinszky: I really do not see why it’s the end of the rule of law, but then I am not a lawyer.
"The Constitutional Court and the ordinary judiciary have suffered a severe blow under the Fidesz constitution. Other independent institutions have fared no better.
The ombudsman system, which once comprised four independent ombudsmen with independent jurisdictions, has now been folded into one office with a much smaller staff. The former data protection ombudsman was fired and the office has been absorbed directly into the government, something that has generated an infringement action launched by the European Commission against Hungary at the European Court of Justice because EU law requires an independent data privacy officer."
Zlinszky: There remained one ombudsman but the staff actually grew a bit. Still, we do mourn the loss of the Green Ombudsman and the Ombudsman for Minorities. I think it was shooting itself in its own foot for Hungary, surrounded by ethnic Hungarian minority communities all around, to erase the independent ombudsman for minorities, and do away with the widely acknowledged invention of the Future Generations ombudsman.
The Data Protection Ombudsman’s office was transformed into another independent authority. The new head is indeed close to Fidesz, but his rulings are not slavish.
"As of two weeks ago, the central bank has a new governor, who moved to that job from being minister of the economy. He used his ministerial power to unilaterally change the rules for the central bank. Without the need for parliamentary approval or Court review, then, György Matolcsy, as the Fidesz economics minister, gave the office of György Matolcsy, the new central bank governor, dramatically increased powers just before he moved from one job to the next. The charter of the central bank, as it turns out, is not even a statute passed by Parliament but a document that either the bank itself or the minister of the economy can change at will."
Zlinszky: Appointing a minister to the position of governor of the Central Bank is not unprecedented in democracies. Also, former Hungarian governments as well as other democratic governments have changed the Central Bank “charter” before. The former Socialist prime minister (Gyurcsany) changed the bank`s charter and inflated the bank`s board with his own men to get a majority in there. No outcries in the US those days …Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi?
"The new media council has a chair appointed directly by the prime minister and a membership that consists exclusively of members elected by the Fidesz parliamentary two-thirds, both for nine-year terms. The media council has draconian powers to levy bankrupting fines based on a review of the content of both public and private media, including broadcast, print and internet media. A Constitutional Court decision freed the print media from some of these constraints, but the Fidesz government could now easily amend the constitution to bring the print media back under control and the Constitutional Court could say nothing further about it.
The election commission has been revamped and now consists exclusively of members who have been elected by the Fidesz parliamentary two-thirds majority, all for terms of nine years. While each party with a national list in the next election (scheduled for April 2014) will have a temporary member on the commission during the campaign, opposition parties will be easily outvoted by the Fidesz majority.
The legal framework for the 2014 election is still in flux. The Fidesz parliamentary two-thirds has already enacted two election laws over vociferous protest from opposition parties, creating an even more disproportionate system than the one it replaced. One law gerrymanders the districts for the next election in such a way that it will be very difficult for the opposition to win. The law even fixes the exact boundaries of election districts in a cardinal law that requires a two-thirds vote of the Parliament to change. This law also eliminates the second round of voting for single-member districts so that someone without majority support in a district can enter Parliament, which was not previously the case."
Zlinszky: She could have just said, Hungary enacted the British “first past the post” system as this is the description of it. That doesn’t sound bad enough then, right?
"The government passed a second cardinal law on elections that instituted a system of voter registration, even though the country has conducted more than 20 years of elections with an excellent “civil list” that has never produced any complaints of irregularity. The Constitutional Court struck down voter registration as unconstitutional, and for now the governing party seems to have given up on this idea. But with its parliamentary two-thirds vote, the government has the power to override the Constitutional Court by simply adding voter registration to the constitution. The government may also change other important features of the election system right up until the election takes place. In fact, at the moment, the election framework is presently incomplete. Among other things, no rules have yet been devised for making and verifying voter lists for ethnic Hungarians in the neighboring states who have recently become eligible for citizenship as the result of constitutional changes."
Zlinszky: There were wide complaints that the 2002 and 2006 elections were considerably rigged, so Ms. Scheppele is not right when stating that there were no complaints regarding the “civil list” election system in the last 20 years.
"The Fourth Amendment added new electoral rules just last week. The amendment created a constitutional ban on political advertising during the election campaign in any venue other than in the public broadcast media, which is controlled by the all-Fidesz media board. Moreover, only parties with national party lists can advertise at all in the national media, which might exclude smaller and newer parties. These restrictions had been previously declared unconstitutional by the Constitutional Court, so the government amended the constitution to override that decision. And since these provisions are now in the constitution itself, the Constitutional Court cannot review them again.
But suppose that, despite all of the obstacles that the current governing party has put in the way of the political opposition, an opposition coalition manages to win the next election. The Fidesz constitution has created a trap that can be snapped in just such a case. The constitution creates a national budget council with the power to veto any future budget that adds to the national debt, which any foreseeable budget will do. The members of the budget council have been chosen by the Fidesz two-thirds majority for terms of 6 or 12 years and can be replaced only if two-thirds of the parliament can agree on their successors when their terms are over. Not only does this mean that, for three elections cycles out, any future government must follow a budgetary course agreed on by a council where all of the members were elected by the Fidesz government, but this budget council has even more power than that."
Zlinszky: Why should “any foreseeable budget” add to the national debt? In fact, between 1998 and 2012, the Fidesz government lowered the national debt considerably, and it lowered it again between 2010 and 2013. The budgets adding to the national debt were those of the left-wing governments, without exception. This is not a necessity, merely a traditionally preferred trend of the liberal side in Hungary.
When the Head of the National Office of Budgetary Control (Szamvevoszek) was elected for 12 years by the Horn-led parliament, no one raised an eyebrow, including Kim Lane Scheppele. That is the point of checks and balances. The term of office of important officials lasts longer than a term of government.
"The constitution requires the Parliament to pass a budget by March 31 of each year. If the Parliament fails to do so, the president of the country can dissolve the Parliament and call new elections. When this provision is put together with the powers of the budgetary council, the constraints on any future government are clear. If a new non-Fidesz government passes a budget that adds to the debt, that budget can be vetoed by the all-Fidesz budgetary council at any time, including on the eve of the budget deadline given in the constitution. The parliament would then miss the deadline and the president (also named by Fidesz and serving through 2017) could call new elections. And this process can be repeated until an acceptable government is voted back into power.
The Fidesz government may have created this unfortunate interaction of constitutional provisions inadvertently in an earnest attempt to create a binding mechanism to achieve budget discipline. But it would be easy for the Fidesz government to achieve fiscal discipline without creating this anti-democratic trap. The Fidesz government could amend the constitution to require that the budget council veto the budget by a deadline that would give the Parliament time to pass a new budget before the president gains the power to dissolve it. I have personally suggested this to high-level members of Fidesz, but an amendment to this effect has so far not appeared.
There is more that could be said about the new Fidesz constitution. I have only mentioned what I take to be the biggest obstacles posed to constitutionalism and democracy by this new constitutional framework.
What can be done about the Fidesz consolidation of power by the United States, the US Helsinki Commission, and by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe?
First, of course, Hungarian democracy must be created and maintained by Hungarians themselves. But a democratic public must be an educated public and Hungarians themselves need to learn what has happened to their own constitution over the last three years. Most have no idea, and not because they couldn’t or wouldn’t understand.
The government celebrated its new constitution with great fanfare. They set up “constitutional tables” at every town hall where people could sign up to receive their very own copy of the constitution. Last June, the government presented to every secondary school graduate a coffee-table book with the words of the new constitution illustrated with historic and specially commissioned paintings. But much of what I have mentioned above is not contained in the text that government has distributed. Many of the most worrisome provisions that I have highlighted here are in the constitutional amendments made since that time or in the cardinal laws that can only be accessed through reading the immensely difficult legalese of the Magyar Közlöny. These laws are posted online only in PDF form, not searchable unless one goes through each individual daily issue separately."
Zlinszky: These laws are all searchable online.
"Hungary’s friends, including the United States, could assist financially with a program to educate citizens, lawyers and judges in Hungary about the new constitutional framework in Hungary. A public education campaign about the new constitutional structure – conducted by Hungarian constitutional experts from the government, from the opposition and from academia – may assist in giving Hungarians better information about their new constitutional system. Such a campaign would be especially effective if it could be conducted through the broadcast media in Hungary, though since the government functionally controls the broadcast media through its Media Council, some monitoring system would have to be put in place to ensure that both the government and opposition voices are heard. Having read thousands of petitions that ordinary Hungarians sent to the Constitutional Court in the 1990s, I am confident that Hungarians themselves will rise to the defense of both democracy and constitutionalism once they see the dangers of a flawed constitutional design."
Zlinszky: The above written are misleading. Most of the Hungarian media are private, and most people only watch these private channels. The owners have sweeping freedom over editorial policy and they use that freedom. The Media Council has no power whatsoever to stem a program of the kind that Kim Lane Scheppele describes.
"Second, the Hungarian government vociferously claims that it is still a democracy because political parties may freely organize for the parliamentary elections next year. But its critics are concerned that the government presently controls the media landscape, has enacted a number of legal provisions that disadvantage opposition parties, and continues to change the electoral rules. In fact, nothing prohibits the government from changing important elements of the electoral framework at the last minute. With the election only one year away, it is important to get the rules of the game fixed – fairly – as soon as possible."
Zlinszky: The government declared in autumn that no more changes will be proposed to the system before the elections. The election law still has to be voted on because some parts – like the US-style voter registration system – were struck down by the Court. I see this as a sign of checks and balances working properly.
"The OSCE has expertise in monitoring elections to ensure that they are free and fair. The OSCE should insist that the electoral rules be settled far enough ahead of the election so that all who want to contest the election have a reasonable amount of time to organize themselves accordingly.
Enough questions have been raised about the willingness of the current Hungarian government to recognize the political opposition that the OSCE/ODIHR should also fully monitor the 2014 Hungarian parliamentary elections. This should include not just election-day or long-term monitoring missions. The comprehensively changed new constitutional framework warrants an early Needs Assessment Mission from OSCE/ODIHR, one that can fully review the effects of all the new provisions. It should focus on the ability of political parties to organize and to get their message out, access to the media, and the fairness of the basic election framework including the creation of electoral districts and the compatibility of both the content and timing of the new electoral rules with the principles of free and fair elections."
Zlinszky: Some wish they would have monitored earlier ones.
"Third, the US government should press the Hungarian government to live up to its international commitments to democracy, constitutionalism, the rule of law and robust rights protection. The US should be vigilant in monitoring backsliding from the high level of constitutional democratic protections that Hungary had achieved after 1989 and the US should cooperate with the Venice Commission, the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly Monitoring Committee, and the European Union (for example, the LIBE Committee of the European Parliament), all of which have ongoing monitoring processes in place.
But the US government should also be aware that, under pressure, the Fidesz government has in the past promised minor changes to its comprehensive framework and then has discarded those changes when the pressure lifted. Moreover, the changes that the Fidesz government has previously offered to make do not really address the key problems of the system. The Fidesz constitutional framework is a highly redundant system that must be understood as a whole. Each individual legal rule cannot be evaluated by itself because one must understand the function of that rule in the larger system. Changing a number of small features of this constitutional order may not in fact address the most serious problem – which is the concentration of political power in the hands of one party. In deciding whether the Hungarian government has been responsive to international and domestic criticism, Hungary’s allies need to examine whether proposed changes really alter the way this complex and integrated system works as a whole.
The US should resist entering the battle of competing checklists of constitutional features. The Hungarian government often insists that some other European country has the same individual rule that its friends criticize. Perhaps we should remember Frankenstein’s monster, who was stitched together from perfectly normal bits of other once-living things, but who was, nonetheless, a monster. No other constitutional democracy in the world, let alone in Europe, has the combination of constitutional features that Hungary now has. In evaluating Hungary for its compliance with international standards, its international friends must look at the whole constitutional system and not just at individual pieces as it assesses whether Hungary still belongs to the family of constitutional democracies.
Finally, Hungary is a small country in Europe. It may be hard to see why the United States should spend any of its political capital to address what former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called Hungary’s backsliding from constitutional democracy. There are two main reasons why the US should care, apart from the fact that it is painful to see any country retreat from democracy and one should always be concerned about the people adversely affected.
Hungary is a partner with the US not only in the OSCE, but also in NATO. OSCE commits its member states to the protection of human rights as defined under the Helsinki Final Act of 1975, and long experience shows that human rights receive their best protection from the maintenance of a constitutional and democratic government, both of which are now in doubt in Hungary. The NATO Charter creates a union of states “determined to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilisation of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law.” But these commitments are also being challenged by the concentration of power in Hungary under its new constitutional framework. Both the OSCE and NATO commit its member states to good behavior and good government, which these organizations should be able to monitor.
In addition, other countries in Hungary’s neighborhood are looking with great interest at what Hungary is doing. They can see that the European Union, the Council of Europe, the OSCE, NATO and the United States have limited influence and ability to induce a national government to change its domestic laws. Hungary’s neighbors understand that Hungary is getting away with consolidating all political power in the hands of one party, and many find that enticing. Troubling recent developments in Romania, Bulgaria and Slovenia show that the Hungarian problem of overly concentrated power could spread if the US and its European allies don’t stand up for their values in the Hungarian case. The US should therefore treat constitutional problems in Hungary with a sense of urgency, both because of the speed with which this system is being locked in and because of the likelihood that the Hungarian constitutional disease could spread around the neighborhood.
In closing then, I strongly urge the United States, the US Helsinki Commission and the OSCE to take Hungary seriously, engage with the Hungarian government on matters of constitutional reform, and work toward ensuring that the channels of democratic participation remain open in Hungary so that the Hungarian people retain the capacity to determine the sort of government under which they will live. The legal changes I have described today pose a real danger to fundamental democratic and constitutional values, and Hungary’s friends need to sound the alarm."
Zlinszky: As a closing remark, I wish to add that, as many would know (and I hope some of my remarks above show, too), I am not a blind supporter of the politics of this government and parliament at all. On the contrary, I could give a very critical testimony myself, e.g. about the unsustainability of the budget or the public investments, to mention but a few fields of governance. What annoys me immensely, however, is when members of reputable academic institutions abuse their credit and mislead their audience “verbo, opere et omissione.” “The whole truth, nothing but the truth.” No less, no more, and that all in a sine ira et studio treatise. That is what I would expect a testimony coming from a Princeton scholar to be. It saddens me to see the contrary.
Ez ki fogja akasztani az oroszokat: a NATO közvetlenül Oroszország határa mellett hoz létre műveleti központot
A most bejelentett döntés értelmében Mikkeli lesz a NATO szárazföldi erőinek észak-európai központja.
Osztrák lap: A finnek jobban szeretik a gulyást, mint Orbánt
A Die Presse írása szerint a finnek nem szimpatizálnak a magyar kormány orosz-, kínai- és Trump-barátságával.
Hungary’s prime minister is doing the right thing – Nicolas Sarkozy told Mandiner on Orban's trip to Moscow
According to the former French president, who has long maintaine an excellent relationship with Orban, restoring communication channels is the first step on the road to peace.
Helsinki megmenti az illegális migránsokat a saját kormányától
Finnország fővárosa átveszi az amerikai modellt.
Werner Patzelt: There needs to be better information about Hungary abroad
Germans are only able to look at Europe's map from their own perspective and can't accept that Hungary's perspective is different – says Prof. Werner Patzelt in an interview with Mandiner.
Egy budapesti templomnál látták utoljára, egy szír börtönből került elő az amerikai férfi
Travis Timmerman arról is mesélt, milyen volt hónapokig az Aszad-rezsim börtönében ülni.
Súlyos baleset érte Nancy Pelosit Luxemburgban: kórházban kezelik
A volt amerikai házelnök, Nancy Pelosi egy hivatalos luxemburgi út során szenvedett balesetet, de állapota stabil, és a kórházból is folytatja munkáját.
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Sorrend:
kulalak
2015. november 10. 01:03
I noticed the comments growing tired of correcting KLS:) She likes the limelight, she wants to be attacked and cornered, then she feels important! and she is not. She should be ignored.
If I were at the HQ of Princeton, I might call KLS to a meeting. Her 'scientific' merit (one-sided or single sided presentations, never any positives only negatives) and credentials (not a lawyer either) and career moves (Krugman's blog) to prey on a small country without anybody (peer-to-peer) backing her claims leaves her vulnerable. Shallow and unnecessary "agit prop". Not a good representation of american political science.
"Between 1948 and 1988 it was the Red Army occupying Hungary and their communist puppets at every important post whose brute force “guaranteed cooperation.” It was not any piece of law. Laws were irrelevant."
Correct statement. Minor detail, the Red Army stayed until 1991, the puppets were not kicked out until 1990 (or until today ...) but I got the message and agree with it. A polak:) would understand, KLS will never.
Mirr-Murr
2013. május 29. 14:47
Not a bad series of notes but the many excuses do not help the reader to realize Scheppele's utterly evil political intention and pathetically bad bad bad expertise. If Princeton is Scheppele, Princeton is lost.
And again: the Latin phrases are misspelled.
Mirr-Murr
2013. április 30. 20:02
The correct Latin is "verbo opere et omissione".
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