ABSTRACT
In 2022, Hungary had a ten-year-old Constitution. The new constitutional story started in 2010 after the Fidesz-KDNP party coalition won a two-thirds constitution-making majority in Parliament and adopted the Fundamental Law of Hungary. The new Constitution, apart from its fundamental political goals, was intended to respond to the challenges of the financial crisis according to its official justification. Today, we face a new challenge: the humanitarian catastrophe with the war in Ukraine in the shadow of the threat of the pandemic, and we are again in search of suitable constitutional answers within the framework of (illiberal) constitutional democracy. Constitutional democracies tackle dangerous situations very differently; some introduce a special legal order, while some do not. Irrespective of whether the constitutional solution is within or without the normal legal order, the state must respect and protect human rights as much as possible. In this chapter, I discuss the standards of fundamental rights protection in times of normality. Then I turn to the discussion of the situation that occurred during the state of emergency, with special regard to the theoretical and jurisprudential conclusions of the Constitutional Court of Hungary regarding the applicable standards. I conclude with a scholarly evaluation of this practice.
