Faculty of Law and Politikal Sciences

The doctrine of privacy on the streets and in other public places is a relatively new development in European human rights jurisprudence. People do peculiar things on the streets, which sometimes turn out to be of interest to the media, and sometimes these actions lead to social tensions. In some instances people merely exercise their freedom of speech or other political rights in various ways and at other times individuals simply wish to remain unnoticed. The four cases detailed below all raise questions relating to the protection of privacy on the streets. Although we are far from seeing a distinct and consistent ECtHR practice, some of the most important considerations are already identifiable, and such cases may in the future may resolved along similar lines.

Restrictions on hate speech present one of the thornier problems facing modern democracies today, involving a contradiction between the constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech and the necessity to protect individual rights.  In contrast to the American concept of free speech, the European approach holds that hate speech may be restricted.  In general, although in Europe, too, constitutional guarantees exist that protect even racist or hateful speech, and these guarantees must be observed. The dispute is perhaps even more marked in new democracies where the foundations of freedom of speech law must be developed in a short space of time while various social tensions, that might have been concealed under a previous dictatorship, boil to the surface following transformation of the political system.
In this paper I argue that the doctrine of clear and present danger, as formulated by the US Supreme Court, should also apply to hate speech, although it has yet to become a widespread norm in European constitutional thought. In Hungary, the Constitutional Court has attempted to introduce this doctrine in several cases, involving the constitutionality of hate speech  restrictions.  The doctrine has also been applied in the European Court of Human Rights (hereinafter: ECtHR) in the opinions of several individual judges. This paper reviews the evolution of the doctrine in the US (Section II), and then describes its emergence in Europe, using the examples of Hungary (Section III) and the ECtHR (Section IV).

The purpose of the present paper is to identify the legal position and role of the right of reply within the European concept of media law. We wish to find an answer to the question whether the right of reply constitutes a limitation to the freedom of the press or if it is to be understood as a means of exercising freedom of opinion (or both, perhaps). We shall also try to identify the common foundations of the regulation of the right of reply and its general, or at least, most common, manifestations in Europe. According to our preliminary hypothesis, the right of reply is a legal instrument serving both the person whose (personality) rights have been violated (the applicant in the legal procedure) and the public wishing to access a wide variety of information via the media. The conclusions of the paper shall confirm or refute this hypothesis.

Personality rights enjoy strong protection under various legal systems as a result of twentieth century legal developments. For a long time, it did not even occur to anyone that the level of this protection should be differentiated according to the type of statements that are harmful to an individual’s reputation, or that this level should be reduced for certain types of persons. False statements and statements that are harmful to an individual’s reputation were naturally regarded as constitutionally unprotected statements, until the emergence of the idea that certain statements relating to public debates and which may be harmful to the reputation of public figures should be afforded special protection. Such special protection is necessitated by the paramount importance of the freedom to engage in public debates. The development of the protection of reputation in modern times is difficult to reconcile with the recognition of privileged statuses and the fact that an individual is active in public life is regarded as one that automatically reduces the scope of such protection. This approach is essential to a fundamental feature of democratic societies: open debates on public matters are more important—up to a certain limit—than the protection of the personality rights of the persons being criticised. Persons participating in public life voluntarily waive their opportunity to enforce their personality rights in general. The limited protection of the reputation and honour of public figures thus became acknowledged in all legal systems which recognise the above distinction.
It is an almost uniform feature of European legal systems that this reduction of the scope of the protection of the reputation of public figures is not provided for in codified law; the manner of the application of the law in this special case is left to the case law of the courts. Only a couple of states form an exception to this but, even in their case, it is usually only in the field of criminal justice that the legal code of the branch of the law offers any guidance. Common European law, respecting the specific, organically evolved solutions applied by the member states, has not attempted a uniform resolution of this issue; however, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), which is traditionally very active in these areas, has successfully drawn up the foundations that the various states are required to take into account when applying the law.
In this study, we present the international background of the question under review. Then we provide a brief overview of the solutions applied in specific European countries, broken down by the most important problems. Later sections take a closer look at the Hungarian regulations and the jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court (CC) and ordinary courts, and examine the Strasbourg cases relating to Hungary, but with lessons for those outside the country too.

The concept of media freedom, in modern European philosophical and legal thinking, is constantly changing. Originally, back in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it did not necessarily mean more than the exclusion of state intervention prior to publication, while still allowing prosecutions to begin after publication. By the twentieth century, in the age of mass media, this narrow definition was no longer sustainable. With the recognition in various jurisdictions of the idea that the media have a fundamental task in the democratic public sphere, these states needed to draw the respective conclusions which, in turn, affected the concept of media freedom. This concept is about to be redefined once again, thanks to new participants that have become active players in transmitting various content to the general public. In this paper we wish to examine whether it is justified to rethink the notion of media freedom, having regard to these new participants. In part 1, we examine the differences between freedom of speech and media freedom (freedom of the press) in order to identify the content of the currently used notion of ‘media freedom’. Part 2 provides an overview of the different elements of the legal notion of ‘media’. In part 3 we shall reveal who might be the holders of the right to media freedom, which new players might claim protection under this right and the unique tasks they play in the operation of the democratic public sphere. Part 4 discusses the relationship between the internet and the democratic public sphere, and briefly assesses the fading hopes that were present at the dawn of the internet age. In part 5 we briefly draw possible conclusions from the previous parts with respect to the future role of the state.

Scaremongering is restrained by criminal law as a limitation to freedom of speech in Hungarian law. Without relevant case law, free speech commentators had rarely discussed the provision until the government’s actions taken in order to step up against the Covid-19 pandemic, and the following amendment of the Criminal Code in Spring 2020 brought the subject back into the field of public debates. The article analyses the constitutional issues related to the limitation of scaremongering, and takes the two constitutional court decisions in this subject as guideline.

In keeping with the general European conception of freedom of speech, the Hungarian legal system achieves an appropriate balance between the interests vested in the protection of religious communities and the freedom of expression. In itself the injury, the feeling of hurt caused by criticism or even vilification of religion does not provide adequate grounds for the restriction of speech (an exception from this is the prohibition applicable to commercial communications published in the media). The new constitutional system has not changed this approach. The relevant passages of the new Churches Act are primarily declarative in nature. When examining these provisions which, at first sight, appear to give preference to churches over associations performing religious activities in a broader context, it becomes apparent that, in respect of the freedom of speech of religious communities as well as the protection of such communities from the freedom of speech, no distinction is made betwe...

The issue of the use of religious symbols by the State, the Government, the Municipalities and Courts has emerged as a practical constitutional problem during the last quarter of a century. Contradictory examples of us Supreme Court jurisprudence prove that this issue is among the constitutional ‘hard cases’. The relatively recent appearance of the problem clearly indicates the ways in which American social conditions have changed and the transformation of us society’s attitude to religion.