Judicial Review in Hungary: The Turmoil of Organisational Changes through the Lenses of Procedural Law

Abstract

The last decade of Hungarian administrative justice and public administration has been marked by organisational changes. These changes affected the effectiveness of judicial review and of legal protection against administration in general. The article aims to trace these changes back and show how they are affecting procedural rules and diminishing legal protection against administration. First, a chronicle of the continuous changes of the organisation of administrative justice is given, together with the repartition of competences, to then turn to the interdependencies of administrative procedures and administrative litigation in the centralisation processes and their effects on the remedy system in administrative litigation. Finally, the rules on the composition of court as a third layer of organisational issues are analysed to conclude that the legislator somewhat set aside the policy goal of ensuring effective legal protection through the rules of judicial review.