Minister of Justice László Trócsányi regards the issue of public administration courts as a priority, and in a recent interview published on the boon.hu news portal stressed: the goal is to increase the quality of the public administration justice system.

He explained that this special form of court system is totally different from the work of traditional courts in view of the fact that the parties and the role of judges are different.

The Minister said we require courts that have an extensive professional knowledge with relation to certain sectors within the field of public administration law, and accordingly the Government would like to establish a specialised system with eight regional public administration courts and a central Public Administration High Court, in which judges are characterised by a high level of professional knowledge within the field of public administration.

“It is no accident that in Western Europe and the neighbouring countries there is also a separate public administration court system”, he pointed out.

“I am optimistic and trust that the Public Admiration High Court will be set up next year, 70 years after the disbanding of the Hungarian Royal Administrative Court in 1949”, Mr. Trócsányi said.

With relation to the constitutional amendment, the Minister of Justice highlighted the fact that the Fundamental Law is valuable for two reasons: on the one hand its stability is extremely important, but it must also be capable of responding to issues that are novel and global, and to which it cannot currently respond.

With relation to the Act on the Freedom of Assembly recently submitted to Parliament, he stressed that the freedom of assembly is a very important human liberty. “Prior to the regime change, the hastily drawn-up Act III of 1989 included provisions on the freedom of assembly, but we now have 30 years of experience at our disposal. What we can see is that the current legislation is lacking and imperfect, many of its articles have been repealed or annulled by the Constitutional Court, and the Act does not provide solutions to the problems that arise these days”, he explained.

“We took as our model the acts on the freedom of assembly currently in force in Bavaria and Saxony-Anhalt, which ban public gatherings on days that are significant to National Socialism, and in the case of the latter also Communism, in the interests of protecting the victims of these regimes. By using the Bavarian legislation as the basis for our own, we have adopted an Act on the Freedom of Assembly that is both modern and also mirrors the legal practices of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg”, Mr. Trócsányi said.

The Minister refuted claims that the Act on the Protection of Privacy currently before Parliament is about politicians. As he explained, in Hungary the protection of privacy and the home have also been reinforced in the Constitution, and it must be recognised that public figures also have private lives and that the relatives of public figures are not themselves public figures, unless they make themselves one.

“This is also a piece of legislation that will be welcomed by the majority of the legal profession in view of the fact that it is a modern law and conforms to today’s requirements; at such a high level of technological development at which anybody’s life can be disrupted, some kind of protection definitely needs to be provided”, Mr. Trócsányi stated.

(Ministry of Justice/MTI)