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The COVID-19 pandemic has posed a major challenge not only to the effectiveness of health crisis management by national governments but also to the democratic functioning of states. This article describes how the institutional guarantees of the democratic exercise of power in Hungary malfunctioned. The operation of Parliament and local self-governments as representative bodies, the Constitutional Court, the Ombudsperson, and the courts as control- and judicial-type institutions will be analysed vis-à-vis the Hungarian Government's action. The study thus aims to reveal how the systematic challenges and diminishing role of local self-governments in collaborative crisis management are not an outstanding and isolated problem, but part of the systematic autocratic regime change in Hungary accelerated by the COVID-19-related special legal order.

The economic crisis of 2008 brought about a rapid depreciation in the exchange rate of the Hungarian forint (HUF). Debtors in Hungary had borrowed money in foreign currencies—especially the Swiss franc—and now found themselves in a significantly deteriorating situation. The consequences of increased indebtedness reached all levels of society. On various grounds, consumers took out numerous civil law proceedings to challenge consumer loan agreements. Questions raised by these lawsuits were, several times, brought to Hungary's Supreme Court, and were then taken to the legislature. The legislative acts and judicial decisions that ensued were subsequently reviewed by the Constitutional Court of Hungary. This article analyses the case law the Constitutional Court applied in this crisis situation, and brings out the lack of balancing capacity in the constitutional adjudication. Referring to the principles of basic Rule of Law, the author makes a critical assessment of the new constitutional ideas, measures and legal solutions that emerged.

Die verfassungsrechtlichen Umbrüche Ungarns waren in den letzten Jahrzehnten enorm. Der Band untersucht die Rechtsprechung des ungarischen Verfassungsgerichtshofs und bietet damit die Möglichkeit eines tiefen Verständnisses des demokratischen Systems.

"This book explores the relationship between populism or populist regimes and constitutional interpretation used in those regimes. The volume discusses the question of whether contemporary populist governments and movements have developed, or encouraged new and specific constitutional theories, doctrines and methods of interpretation, or whether their constitutional and other high courts continue to use the old, traditional interpretative tools in constitutional adjudication. Divided into four parts, Part I contains three chapters elaborating the theoretical basis for the discussion. Part II examines the topic from a comparative perspective, representing those European countries where populism is most prevalent, including: Austria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Romania, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Part III extends the focus to the United States, reflecting how American jurisprudence and academia have produced the most important contributions to the theory of constitutional interpretation, and recent political developments in that country might challenge the traditional understanding of judicial review. This section also includes a general overview on Latin America, where there are also some populist governments and strong populist movements. Finally, the editors' closing study analyzes the outcomes of the comparative research, summarizing the conclusions of the book"--

In the Hungarian legal system, the anti-hate speech rules of media law provide an ad-ditional (administrative) proceeding for the media authority in parallel with proceedings under criminal law and civil law. The media authorities, over the past twenty years, have consistently set media law sanctions at a lower intervention threshold than criminal law did, and in many cases, they established media law violation in cases where criminal proceedings for incitement against a community were not initiated or ended in acquittal. The fundamental aim of media law regulation is to shape media content and the edit-ing practices of media players with a view to ensure respect for human dignity, and to prevent media from becoming an 'amplifier' of hateful communications. In the first four-teen years of the Hungarian media regulation, the scope of interpretation concerning anti-hate speech media law restrictions developed gradually. The authority reacted not only to individual cases, and individual communications, but also carried out targeted investigations in cases that can be described as a phenomenon in the media coverage. Besides reviewing news and information programmes, it also acted against hateful con-tents of the entertainment programmes. The new media regulation, which entered into force in 2011, partially amended the content of the former anti-hate speech regulation: in addition to the provisions of "incitement to hatred", the former category of "offending or prejudiced content" was replaced by the prohibition of "exclusion". The practice of the media authority has not changed as regards the assessment of the media law standard, as the authority has continued to apply it differently from the criminal law standard, con-sidering it as a lower intervention threshold. However, in comparison with pre-2010 practice, the authority initiated considerably fewer proceedings and its approach in terms of law enforcement became less characterised by adjudicating problems that can be de-scribed as phenomenon in the media coverage, no targeted proceedings of this kind were initiated. Its practice can be characterised by a couple of high profile cases with extreme sanctions, which attract great attention. These cases are important as they designate the boundaries of public communications, but in this way, media law measures are not really suitable for making any substantial changes to the characteristics of the media coverage.

"Emergencies are ubiquitous in 21st-century societal discourses. From the rise of emergency pronouncements since 9/11 accompanied by the associated violations of fundamental rights, through talks of 'crises' in the EU in relation to the economy, Putin's occupation of Crimea-recently amplified by the full-scale invasion of Ukraine-or refugees, to the long-neglected climate emergency, emergency discourses have been catapulted to the center of attention by the critical juncture of the COVID-19 pandemic. This volume presents and compares the existing regulations and practices of emergencies and human rights protection in the Visegrad (V4) countries. As such, the analysis covers Czechia, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. Although these European countries share a common historical experience and are now members of the EU and NATO, they differ in some of their constitutional traditions and, also, in the dynamics of their political regimes. Divided into three parts, the first two comprehensively discuss the constitutional models of emergency and human rights protection in each of the V4 countries, while the third part illustrates how these models and the general framework of rights protection materialised in the limitations of the selected human rights during the COVID-19 pandemic. The volume provides a compass for more in-depth, comparative, and interdisciplinary inquiries into the forms and practices of emergencies in one of the EU regions that face illiberalisation and the consequences of the ongoing invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation on its eastern borders. It will be a valuable resource for academics, researchers, and policy-makers working in the areas of Constitutional Law and Politics"--