Documents related to the constitution-making process in Hungary – Spring 2011
16 March 2011 – The Eötvös Károly Institute, the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union and the Hungarian Helsinki Committee compiled a joint analysis on the process of framing the new Constitution of Hungary. The three NGOs submitted their comments to the Venice Commission, the Council of Europe’s advisory body on constitutional matters, which will form an opinion in the near future on the process of framing the new Constitution of Hungary. According to the analysis, the current way of designing the Constitution makes one doubt whether this document will be worthy of being called the Constitution of Hungary. The NGOs claim that the need for a new Constitution was not supported by adequate reasons, the new Constitution has been prepared in secret, the open public debate and the debate of experts over the text was missed and due to procedural rules of adopting it, the new Constitution will be the product of one political party.
The full text of the analysis is available here.
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29 March 2011 – The three NGOs above have submitted background materials to the leaders of the European Parliament groups concerning the draft Constitution of Hungary, such as the list of the most problematic substantive issues, a document drawing attention to those instances of erroneous or missing English translation of the draft text that concern the issues that are the gravest from the point of view of human rights and the rule of law, and comments on the background materials distributed to MEPs by the Hungarian Government.
The list of the most important instances of erroneous or missing English translation is available here. (You may find the full list here.) The comments of the NGOs on the Government’s background materials are available here. The three NGOs also provided the European Parliament groups and the Secretary General with an authentic, not official, translation of the draft-Constitution of ruling parties, which is available here.
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12 April 2011 – The Eötvös Károly Institute, the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union and the Hungarian Helsinki Committee prepared an analysis on the draft Constitution of Hungary.
The analysis in English is available here.