Hungarian Constitutional Court says national authorities must make up for EU inaction on immigration
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Part 1: Warsaw demands EU treaties be complied with and refuses to pay fines imposed by the ECJ
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Unlike the recent judgments of Poland’s and Romania’s constitutional courts, the judgment issued on 10 December 2021 by the Hungarian Constitutional Court regarding the European Court of Justice’s ruling of 17 December 2020 does not reaffirm the primacy of the Hungarian constitution or law over EU law or the ECJ’s case law. At least not in a straightforward manner. Indeed, as stated in the Hungarian court’s judgment, the interpretation of the Hungarian Basic Law requested by Viktor Orbán’s government regarding immigration policies “does not extend to the examination of the primacy of EU law”.
Thus, this judgment has nothing to do with that of the Polish Constitutional Court which enraged the Brussels elites last October. The Polish judgment, like the judgments of a similar nature delivered by the Romanian Constitutional Court in June and December last year, concerned an exclusive competence of the member states: the organisation and functioning of the judiciary.
These two constitutional courts have therefore opposed head-on the judicial putsch attempted by the ECJ, which has been acting with the support of the European Commission and the European Parliament, aiming to extend the EU’s jurisdiction and transform the nature of the European supranational organisation without a new treaty.
The Hungarian judgment, on the other hand, concerns a shared competence: immigration policies. But in this area too, it provides a response to the ECJ’s dangerous judicial activism by stating some general principles that now allow the Hungarian government to say that it will not apply the ECJ’s rulings when they go against an effective fight against illegal immigration.
