BREAKING! Court grants urgent protection to Budapest against Orbán government

The public administration court of the Budapest Municipal Court has ruled in favour of the Budapest municipality’s request for immediate judicial protection, the press department of the Municipal Court said on Tuesday.

Urgent protection to Budapest

The ruling bans the Hungarian Treasury from collecting solidarity contributions from the municipality in May, June, July and August, the statement said.

It also instructed the respondent to pay back to the local authority some 10.2 billion forints (EUR 25.3m) with interest, calculated from May 29 when the Treasury collected it from City Hall’s account.

In its ruling, the court said that the Budapest municipality was in a special situation among local authorities as it is responsible for providing public services for millions of inhabitants. Collecting the solidarity contribution “would make [the municipality’s] liquidity situation impossible” and so would make it incapable of performing its duties, it said.

The municipality has fully proven that paying the solidarity contribution would directly cause an “irreparable burden” to its financial situation, the court said.

The Budapest municipality said in a statement that the ruling meant “Budapest could breathe again” but that a long-term solution required continued negotiations between the government and City Hall, and a decrease of the monies withdrawn from the latter.

Noting that an appeal would not lift the ban on collecting from the city, the authority said that the ruling was “the umpteenth proof that the government restrictions now threatening to cause funding issues in the city are unlawful.”

At the same time, the funding of public services in the city will cause another financial crisis in four months unless the government changes its approach, the statement said.

In a video attached to the statement, Mayor Gergely Karácsony said the ruling meant that public services and the wages of city employees were now safe.