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“THE ‘ETERNAL CANDIDATE’ — THAT WAS ME”: INTERVIEW WITH KAROLY BARD legislator make one reservation to the Convention. Wasn’t this overly optimistic a mere two years after the change of political system? Was our legal system really in such good shape? Were your findings disproved later on? K. B.: We had written this study on our own initiative. Nobody had tasked us to do so. Our main goal was to explore what legislative amendments would be necessary before the ratification of the Convention. As a result we indeed recommended that twelve amendments be made. The reason we suggested so few amendments was that we were looking to find those provisions that could not be applied in conformity with the Convention. As for the reservation, this regarded the Act on misdemeanors, since we hade inside knowledge that the Ministry of the Interior would not rectify it in the foreseeable future. In addition, a political declaration was made on compensation for expropriation and nationalization during the Communist regime. In fact, this was completely obsolete, since the Convention was not applicable to fundamental rights violations perpetrated before its entry into force in Hungary. Was our conclusion overly optimistic? Perhaps you're right. But this was very thorough work and we looked very closely at the Strasbourg case-law. I stayed in Freiburg for a while after my appointment and commuted to Bern every week to meet with my good friend Stefan Trechsel (a member of the European Commission of Human Rights). Over fondue and wine, we went through all the possible scenarios that Hungarian law could come into conflict with the Convention and we looked at every single rule that I found suspicious. All of what we wrote, followed from the case-law of the time. Of course, Hungary had been condemned on occasion for how the law was applied, but never for the wording of legislation. V. Z. K.: In an article published in 1992 you wrote: “It seems that the slogan ‘Return to Europe’ repeated ad nauseam had done its work: provincialism that elevates ignorance to a virtue and self-importance considering all external criticism to be an ‘interference in internal affairs’ has seeped away from our political culture faster than expected.” By contrast, in a 2017 article co-authored with Petra Bard you summarize the 25 year application of the Convention in Hungary as follows: “(Since ratification] the Hungarian legislature has primarily just responded to judgments rendered against Hungary, while no systemic, proactive assessment of the legal system to prevent a breach of the Convention has taken place and no comprehensive ‘legal package’ with the express ambition to achieve conformity with the Convention was brought before the Parliament. The Hungarian judiciary’s knowledge of Strasbourg case-law is acceptable and the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights occasionally appear in the judgments of the courts. Yet there is a view that courts have no competence to directly apply Strasbourg caselaw and sometimes we see instances of a conscious misinterpretation of Strasbourg judgments. At times, political considerations stand in the way of the enforcement + 31 +
