jtiblog

Blogsite of the Institute for Legal Studies

The Covid-19 Pandemic and International Trade

2020. April 17. 16:21
Lukasz Gruszczynski
TK JTI
The Covid-19 Pandemic and International Trade

The Covid-19 pandemic is not only a public health crisis but also a serious challenge for international and domestic politics and for the global economy. The official data shows that the pandemic, as of April 17th, 2020, has already claimed more than 145.000 lives among 2,2 million confirmed cases (for up-to-date information see here). While so far most of the governments have seen an increase in popular support (for example, the approval rating for Giuseppe Conte has gone up by 27%, while for Angela Merkel by 11%, for addition details see here), this trend may soon revert when the economic and social effects of the pandemic will become more apparent. Most of the experts expect to see a deep recession in 2020. For example, the International Monetary Fund, in its latest World Economy Outlook, forecasts that the global economy will shrink by 3%, making the current situation the worst recession since the Great Depression. The advanced economies will be the most affected, with an average contraction of 6.1%, including 5.9% in the United States and 7.5% in the Euro Zone.

Public Money in Political Campaigns. An Analysis on Hungarian State Propaganda

2018. November 19. 16:28
Emese Szilágyi
Junior research fellow, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Centre for Social Sciences
Public Money in Political Campaigns. An Analysis on Hungarian State Propaganda

The use of public money in the political decision-making process has always been a controversial issue. The intervention of the state may easily distort the political competition among the different parties and candidates, and is also capable of undermining the open public debate. A special form of the state’s intervention is when the government itself launches its own propaganda-campaign, dubbing it ‘public information campaign’. In the following blogpost I shortly analyze the nature of the publicly founded state propaganda carried out by the Hungarian government between 2015 and the general elections of 2018.

Panpsychism and Personhood

2017. March 29. 15:45
Dragan Dakić
HAS CSS Institute for Legal Studies
Panpsychism and Personhood

What in fact do we value, is it a matter or manifestation? If we consider manifestation to be morally and legally relevant than it is more than crazy to argue that something so small as an electron has inner life and that we should radically rethink our understanding of matter. Why should we bother with truth of matter if it cannot oblige us? 

Free Market of Human Beings

2017. March 06. 16:33
Dragan Dakić
HAS CSS Institute for Legal Studies
Free Market of Human Beings

Recently the European Court of Human Rights (“Court”) delivered a decision in the case Paradiso and Campanelli v. Italy. The applicants - who were Italian nationals - after unsuccessful in vitro fertilisation treatments decided to try resorting to assisted reproduction techniques and to a surrogate mother in Russia. The child was born in Moscow in 2011 and arrived to Italy a few months later. The Italian authorities refused to register the Russian birth certificate and the child was removed from the applicants. The Court reduced its analysis to the notion of “private life”, inherent in the Article 8 of the European Convention. What is really striking with the reasoning is the omission of the Court to recognize the relevance of the international law instruments designed against human trafficking.

ECtHR clarified standard on minimum space for prisoners

2017. February 26. 21:35
Dániel G. Szabó
Hungarian Helsinki Committee
ECtHR clarified standard on minimum space for prisoners

The European Court of Human Rights (the ‘ECtHR’ or ‘the Court’) has excessive jurisprudence on prison conditions, especially regarding the minimum personal space of inmates. The case law culminated in the recent judgement of Muršić, which was decided last October by the Grand Chamber. In this decision the Court addressed the inconsistencies in its jurisprudence regarding the minimum acceptable space. In the Muršić decision the Court ruled that if the personal space goes below 3 square meters, there is a strong presumption of a violation of Article 3 and the judgement resolves important other contradictions also. It was not totally consistent in the recent practice of the Court whether the decisive space is 3 or 4 m2 or that the personal space below this amount is in itself a violation or not. The origin of the 3 m2 threshold was also not clear from the case law of the Court. In this essay I will review the Court’s pre-Muršić case law on minimum personal space and draw attention to the inconsistencies, then I summarize the findings of Muršić.

International Trade in the Era of Trump

2017. February 17. 18:16
Lukasz Gruszczynski
HAS CSS Institute for Legal Studies / MTA TK Jogtudományi Intézet

The United States has been a champion of free trade and economic globalization for many years. It was one of the architects of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and a founding member of the World Trade Organization. However, the election of Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States has the potential to dramatically change this picture. The new president has repeatedly blamed the current international trade arrangements for destroying jobs in the American industry sector. He promised to redesign the existing trade bargains. But are those plans realistic? How will such moves change the international trade landscape?

International trade agreements captured by domestic politics? Lessons learnt from the CETA case

2016. December 05. 0:28
Balázs Horváthy
Viktor Szép
Lendület-HPOPs Research Group
International trade agreements captured by domestic politics? Lessons learnt from the CETA case International trade agreements captured by domestic politics? Lessons learnt from the CETA case

The Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) between European Union and Canada was nearly to fail after the Wallonia parliament has made steps to  block its domestic ratification in October this year. The obstinate resistance of Wallonia illustrates well, how the legal, political and social context of trade policy have completely changed in the last decades and it gives the Member States a warning that trade agreements no longer can be concluded behind closed doors. 

British exit from the European Union?

2016. May 18. 2:13
Miklós Lojkó
Lendület-HPOPs Research Group
British exit from the European Union?

Today, in the middle of May, with 29% or resondents still undecided, Remain and Leave are head to head in the referendum vote intention poll of polls showing 50-50%. Another poll suggested that 28% of voters will be swayed by “national” considerations, such as migration, while a mere 15% will decide on account of economic reasons.

The ECJ upholds the ECB’s bond buying programme: Preliminary reflections on the judgment of the Court in the Case C-62/14

2015. July 02. 15:32
Darinka Piqani
Lendület-HPOPs Research Group
The ECJ upholds the ECB’s bond buying programme: Preliminary reflections on the judgment of the Court in the Case C-62/14

On 16 June 2015 the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) issued its much awaited judgment in the Gauweiler case (Case C-62/14). The judgment was expected with great interest for at least two reasons: for the ECJ’s position on the validity of the ECB’s bond buying programme ‘OMT” and the interpretation of the Treaties in that regard, and secondly, for its potential implications for the relation between the ECJ and the German Constitutional Court (GCC) from which the reference originated in January 2014 (Order of 14 January 2014, BvR 2728/13).

The Hungarian life imprisonment regime in front of apex courts II.

2015. June 18. 11:57

The regulation of whole life sentences varies in the Member States, however there seems to be a European consensus on granting some form of a meaningful review for possible conditional release from life imprisonment after the expiry of a long-term period spent in prison. Hungary was among the few Member States of the EU and the Council of Europe to have a sanction regime including whole life sentences without the possibility of review for conditional release, until the European Court of Human Rights (hereinafter: ECtHR, Court or Strasbourg court) ruled on the matter and in Magyar v Hungary (Application no. 73593/10, 20 May 2014) declared the Hungarian life imprisonment regime to be in violation of Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights (hereinafter: ECHR or Convention). Last week the Kúria, the supreme court of Hungary had to remedy the human rights violation done to the whole life prisoner winning the Strasbourg case. In the review procedure Mr. Magyar was sentenced to life imprisonment with a possibility of conditional release after 40 years the earliest. In the present blog post the judgment will be analyzed in light of the ECHR and the attached case-law.

The Hungarian life imprisonment regime in front of apex courts I.

2015. June 18. 11:42

 

The regulation of whole life sentences varies in the Member States, however there seems to be a European consensus on granting some form of a meaningful review for possible conditional release from life imprisonment after the expiry of a long-term period spent in prison. Hungary was among the few Member States of the EU and the Council of Europe to have a sanction regime including whole life sentences without the possibility of review for conditional release – until the the European Court of Human Rights (hereinafter: ECtHR, Court or Strasbourg court) ruled on the matter and declared the Hungarian life imprisonment regime to be in violation of Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights (hereinafter: ECHR or Convention). As a response to the judgment, the legislative introduced a novel Pardon Committee proceeding that could have been scrutinized by the Hungarian Constitutional Court, but it missed this opportunity. A brief analysis of Hungary’s obligations flowing from the Strasbourg judgment and the new Pardon Committee proceeding will be offered in this blog post.

EU-Russia Relations and the crisis in Ukraine: how to proceed?

2015. June 15. 9:20
Peter Van Elsuwege
Lendület-HPOPs Research Group
EU-Russia Relations and the crisis in Ukraine: how to proceed?

A certain level of engagement with the EAEU seems unavoidable, but the parallel development of good and differentiated bilateral relations with individual EAEU member countries remains important. Together with the full implementation of the Association Agreements with Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia, this is a key priority for the EU in the years to come. 

Article 7 TEU is a nuclear bomb – with all its consequences?

2015. May 05. 10:22

 

    

Changes in Hungarian public law and the adoption of the Tavares Report have stirred up the debate surrounding Article 7 of the Treaty on European Union (TEU). The present piece of writing analyses whether the “nuclear bomb” metaphor can be applied to Article 7, by resorting to legal economics, criminal law theory and game theory; and represents these findings by focusing on a possible typology of international organisations and on the Hungarian Fundamental Law and its fifth amendment.

Article 7 of the Treaty on European Union – is it really a nuclear weapon?

2015. April 13. 14:48

 

 

​The Treaty of Amsterdam (1998) made it possible for the European Union to impose legal (and not only political) sanctions on a Member State in case of violating the fundamental values of the Union. This practice, which initially connected legal consequences only to the serious and persistent violation of EU values, has been modified by the Treaty of Lisbon (2007) through adding the notion of ‘risking’ these values. Even though this Article has been part of the EU public law for two decades now, it only came to the centre of the Hungarian public attention in the last couple of years, mainly due to the continuous debates about the political turn of 2010 and about the new Hungarian constitution.

UK House of Lords report - The EU and Russia: before and beyond the crisis in Ukraine

2015. March 15. 12:52

 

 

 On 20 February the House of Lords of the United Kingdom, more precisely its EU Sub-Committee on External Affairs, issued a report which can be seen as a thorough evaluation of the Ukraine crisis and the recent developments of EU-Russia relations. The report entitled ‘The EU and Russia: before and beyond the crisis in Ukraine’ does not handle either the EU or Russia with kid gloves, but its criticisms are constructive and contain viable suggestions for the future.

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