Hungarian top court: labour code changes, administrative courts law valid! – UDATE

Hungary’s Constitutional Court on Tuesday declared an amendment to the labour code and the law on the new administrative court system adopted by parliament on Dec. 12 last year to be lawful.

As we wrote, Parliament on Wednesday voted to extend the period employers may account overtime for the purpose of calculating wages and rest days from twelve months to three years, and to raise the upper threshold for annual overtime from 250 to 400 hours, read more HERE.

Opposition MPs had gathered a quarter of members of parliament to appeal the amendment and the legislation, which they argued were adopted amid a breach of parliament’s rules and in conflict with the constitution.

Among the lawmakers’ objections was that parliament’s speaker had not chaired the session from the speaker’s podium.

The court said that voting conditions had not breached so-called guarantee rules and that MPs were personally responsible for meeting procedural expectations of the house, noting that opposition lawmakers had prevented the speaker from accessing the podium.

The court added that, in any case, the rules do not stipulate that sessions may only be held if the speaker occupies the podium.

According to the court, a “constitutional necessity to ensure reasonable operations of parliament” could justify “measures to save majority decision-making from suffering unreasonably large drawbacks arising from the democracy of the assembly”.

The court cited a decision by the European Court of Human Rights, too, declaring that the freedom of debates in parliament is “not unrestricted” and “parliament has the right to intervene when its members disrupt the usual order of the legislative process”. The also noted that “the parliamentary speaker has the right and obligation to ensure that parliament’s dignity is not violated”.