The Commissioner's Petition Concerning the Fourth Amendment to the Basic Law

According to the Commissioner for Fundamental Rights, certain parts of the Fourth Amendment may not fulfil the formal and procedural criteria that are stipulated in the Basic Law. Therefore, upon the authorisation of the Basic Law, the ombudsman challenges the regulations in question at the Constitutional Court.

Several submissions asked Commissioner Máté Szabó to request the constitutional review of certain provisions of the Fourth Amendment. The Basic Law itself states that the Constitutional Court may review the amendments upon formal reasons only, on the ground of infringement of formal or procedural rules concerning the creation and the adoption of the amendment. The Commissioner for Fundamental Rights may submit such a petition within thirty days from the promulgation of the amendment.

Based on the arguments of the submissions, the ombudsman finds on the one hand that several provisions of the Fourth Amendment are contradictory to other provisions of the Basic Law, and on the other some procedural rules were also infringed.

According to the Commissioner, "overconstitutionalisation", the overwriting of the decisions of the Constitutional Court by means of constitutional amendment disrupts the coherence and unity of the Basic Law. Such a situation occurred in the cases of the criminalisation of the homeless, the supervision of financial issues of universities, the regulation on churches, the retroactive criminalisation of political offences committed under the communist dictatorship and the restriction of political campaigns in the media. Furthermore, the repeal of the previous decisions of the Constitutional Court also violates the principle of legal certainty.

The petition also holds that no plenary debate was held on certain regulations of the Fourth Amendment which is a grave breach of the legislative procedure.

The Constitutional Court has to make its decision on the petition within thirty days.