High-profile corruption cases get protracted by court administration

Three recent high-profile corruption cases clearly show that an independent judiciary is essential to fight corruption and eliminate risks for the EU budget, and arbitrary and uncontrolled court management powers are not only a theoretical threat to anti-fraud and anti-corruption measures undertaken by Hungary in the framework of the rule of law conditionality mechanism. While the Hungarian Government declares to have taken all appropriate measures to disperse the serious concerns raised with respect to the Hungarian anti-corruption framework, until now, no concrete measures were taken to address concerns with respect to the independence of the judiciary.

Our new papers highlight that proper legislative steps are necessary to restore the independence of courts and judges in Hungary, otherwise, all anti-corruption proceedings will end up in a court system where political appointees have almost complete freedom to allocate any case to any judge, converting the system of court administration into an inroad of corruption.

The first paper describes how the criminal trial of two major corruption cases got derailed in the court system by administrative measures:

Da capo without fine – The hunt for corruption until the end of times (7 December 2022)

The second paper tracks back the story of how the President of the National Office for the Judiciary, as head of the court administration, barred the possibility of clarifying the events of a major corruption scandal that even reached the Hungarian courts:

The Schadl-Völner case and the battered independence of Hungarian courts (18 November 2022)