Civil Organisations’ Participation in Legislative Processes in Hungary

Abstract

The relationship of the civil/non-profit sector and public administration may be examined from several specific aspects, but in our opinion these fields may be put into three – relatively – well distinguishable groups. Therefore, the relationship of administrative bodies with civil organisations may be identified in a) the creation of administrative programs and participation in legislation; b) the provision of public services, and c) the protection of rights. From these three this work undertakes to describe the aspect of civil participation in programme making and legislation in details, in a way that elaborates on the issue from the side of state administration.
The primary method of this research – due to the shortage of systematic scientific bases – cannot be anything else but the comprehensive collection of formal institutional facilities provided by Hungarian laws.
The paper distinguishes those special forms of participation which approach the legislator (a state administrative body participating in legislation) directly, and those institutionalised solutions through which the citizen or a particular (civil) organisation may influence the content of laws not by approaching the legislator (state administrative body participating in legislation), but through another state organisation.
It can be stated that the Hungarian legal system makes it possible to channel the direct and institutionalised participation of civil entities within program- and law-making activities of organs belonging to public administration, expressing their interests. Moreover, the Hungarian legal system has introduced developed and sophisticated mechanisms even compared to the international legal practice.
Real deficiencies can rather be detected concerning the material and legal consequences of different initiatives, the frequency of convening various corporate bodies, and mere formal mode of operating the particular mechanisms.
Furthermore, the trouble is that the civil/non-profit sector is strongly „infected” by direct partisan politics in Hungary: there is a large number of pseudo-civil entities and initiatives within the scope of activities of proposal-making, advisory and coordinative bodies. A special appearance of the abovementioned difficulties is the lack of strong and effective state-civil society joint mechanisms which aggregate and uphold Roma (Gypsy) interests.
In summary we can draw the conclusion that the individual segments of civil society, the political culture and also the administrative bodies participate in legislation i. e. their representatives must improve to comply with the already existing legal framework of statutory instruments.