Significant Decisions of the Constitutional Court between 1 April and 31 May 2019
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Abstract
The Constitutional Court (hereinafter: CC) made 93 decisions in the first quarter of 2019. From these, 20 decisions were on the merits, meanwhile the others were mainly rejections on formal grounds. In the competences of norm control, the CC has annulled one legal regulation, it declared one constitutional requirement and one legislative omission.
The mostly practiced competence of the CC is still the constitutional complaint procedure, mainly the one against judicial decisions. In its competence, the Court annulled six judicial decisions in the second quarter of 2019.
The Article summarises five significant decisions of the CC from the second quarter of the year. The CC ruled that when the institutional frame of the environmental protection authorities is changed, it is contrary to the Fundamental Law if the first grade and the second grade authority is the same [CC decision 12/2019 (IV. 8.) AB]. The Court ruled that the removable paintings made on the asphalt in order to raise the attention of the authorities for the omitted reparation falls within the protection of the free speech clause and therefore it cannot be sanctioned [CC decision 14/2019 (IV. 17.) AB]. The Court has made several important statements about the obstruction when examining the invalidity under public law of certain amendments of the Labour Code [CC decision 15/2019 (IV. 17.) AB]. The Court ruled that communicative actions that have a threatening character and that may cause public danger do not fall within the protection scope of the free speech clause [CC decision 3089/2019 (IV. 26.) AB]. Lately the Court, when examining the regulation on the prohibition of living on the streets has declared that it is the obligation of the State to help those in need, and from this obligation the State should proceed as a social caretaker, therefore the constitutional prohibition of dwelling on the streets should be counterbalanced by the obligatory institutional care for those without home.