Gábor Tóth ( Associate Professor of Constitutional Law and Human Rights at the University of Debrecen and senior lecturer of Bioethics at the Semmelweis University in Budapest)

Wednesday 15th March, Time TBC. Online.

Please email s.carter@exeter.ac.uk and c.a.m.owen@exeter.ac.uk if you would like to be involved in this event.

In conjunction with Exeter Law Department seminar series.

The Constitution of Hungary promulgated in 2011 and officially called the Fundamental law thoroughly altered the Hungarian constitutional system. Scholars encounter difficulties when attempting to label the new system. While some typologies maintain that despite its illiberalism and populism the new system meets the formal criteria of legality and democracy, others insist that it represents an abuse of democratic constitutionalism. In what follows, I put two rival conceptions of democracy into the main focus to better understand the nature of the Hungarian constitutional system and the competing scholarly positions. First, I briefly introduce the contrast between the majoritarian and what I call the complex conception of democracy. My aim is to demonstrate that even if one subscribes to a majoritarian conception of democracy, certain legal and constitutional preconditions must be fulfilled. In the following sections, I examine the case of Hungary within this theoretical framework. The Hungarian constitutional system presents itself as a winner-takes-all majoritarian democracy. Nevertheless, an analysis of the legal preconditions of democracy — constitutional text, electoral system, legal institutions, fundamental rights, and the rule of law — can demonstrate that in this system, legal mechanisms do not serve to govern the formation of a legitimate majority rule. They create instead an autocratic system, the key attribute of which is the pretence of majoritarian democracy.

Biography

Gábor Attila Tóth writes primarily about the fields of human rights, constitutional theory and comparative constitutionalism, with a current focus on the legal markers of authoritarianism. He is author of eight books, including the edited volumes Constitution for a Disunited Nation (CEU Press, New York-Budapest) and Human Rights (Osiris, Budapest). He is Associate Professor of Constitutional Law and Human Rights at the University of Debrecen and senior lecturer of Bioethics at the Semmelweis University in Budapest. He gained Alexander von Humboldt Foundation senior fellowship to the Humboldt University in Berlin and two visiting fellowships to the New School for Social Research in New York. In 2016-17 he served as constitutional jurisprudence expert in the EU Project, Support to the Constitutional Court of Moldova. Between 2000 and 2010 he worked as key adviser to the Constitutional Court of Hungary. In 1994 he was founder of the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union. 

Web: https://independent.academia.edu/GáborAttilaTóth