Too Much for Others, too Little for Us
The draft of the European Media Freedom Act (EMFA) published last September appears to constitute, in part, an attempt to respond to the systematic erosion of media freedom in Hungary since 2010. The European Commission seems to be aware of how unsuccessful it has been in addressing the problem. Thus, even though the rule of law proceedings against Hungary found a serious violation of media freedom, the conditionality procedure and the Charter of Fundamental Rights eligibility criteria inquiry failed to address the issue. Against this backdrop, this blogpost will analyse the draft EMFA’s capacity to respond to the unique challenges posed by the Hungarian media freedom landscape.
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Never-Ending Exception
The planned 10th amendment to the Hungarian constitution aims to rewrite the current rules of Article 53, which allows the government to declare a state of danger (and rule by decree as it did during the last two years) in the event of a natural or industrial disaster endangering lives and property, or to mitigate the consequences thereof. According to the proposed new rules, the government will also be able to declare this kind of emergency ‘in the event of armed conflict, war or humanitarian catastrophe in a neighbouring country’. This is just the latest chapter in the story of the democratic and rule-of-law backsliding in Hungary.
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Constitutional Identity in and on EU Terms
The EU protects national constitutional identities and does not protect national unconstitutional identities. This is the message the Court of Justice of the EU has sent with its decision of 16 of February 2022, in the cases initiated by Hungary and Poland about the rule-of-law conditionality mechanism, in which it ominously referred to the constitutional identity of the EU. Constitutional identity, according to the CJEU, is a key concept of public law and a fundamental pillar of the EU, so Member States constitutional identities may not be manipulated in such a way that turns into a violation of the constitutional identity of the EU.
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