Part I — Situation overview

At its parliamentary group meeting held on Saturday 8 August 2026, the Tisza parliamentary group nominated András Baka for President of the Republic in a secret ballot. The 73-year-old legal scholar obtained his doctorate in law in 1978 at the Faculty of Law of ELTE, and for more than twenty years was a researcher at the Institute for Legal Studies of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Between 1991 and 2008 he was, for two terms, a judge of the European Court of Human Rights, and in 2009 — on the proposal of the then President of the Republic László Sólyom, at the third attempt — he was elected president of the Supreme Court. His mandate would have run for six years. Under the transitional provisions of the Fundamental Law he had to leave at the end of 2011, three and a half years before the expiry of his mandate; since the rule on his removal was placed into the Fundamental Law, the Constitutional Court could not review the decision. The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) established in 2014, and then with final effect in a Grand Chamber procedure in June 2016, that the removal violated the right to a fair trial: no remedy was available against the decision. The court also found a violation of freedom of expression, because the real reason for the termination of the mandate was the professional opinion criticising the reorganisation of the courts.

The timetable of the nomination is tight. With the recommendation of Prime Minister Péter Magyar and 42 further governing-party members, the nomination is valid; Parliament votes at its sitting on Tuesday 11 August 2026. The elected president may take office on the eighth day following the announcement of the result of the vote, on 19 August, so it is already he who will present the state decorations on 20 August. Under the seventeenth amendment of the Fundamental Law the mandate runs until the entry into force of the new constitution, but for at most five years. Fidesz–KDNP is boycotting the election, because it regards the termination of the previous president’s mandate as invalid in public law; the six-member Mi Hazánk group cannot on its own collect the 40 recommendations needed for a nomination. According to Tisza’s communication they negotiated with ten possible candidates, of whom three were put before the parliamentary group — after the initiative weeks earlier around Judit Polgár, which the person concerned declined.

The nomination immediately called forth two mutually opposed narratives, and both use the same CV as evidence. On one reading the nomination is redress: the judge who was removed by a constitutional amendment fills the highest office in public law. On the other reading the candidate will be the instrument of the majority, and the parliamentary group leader of Fidesz put it, on the very day of the announcement, that the new president will remain in office only until the prime minister replaces him with a single post. The conservative press added a third thread to this: as a Strasbourg judge Baka voted in favour of the convicted person in one of the volley-firing trials, which it presents as a moral counter-argument.

MIAK’s reading: all three framings fall into the same error, because they derive the value of the office from the past of the person holding it. The President of the Republic, however, is not a governmental actor and not the representative of the majority either, but an independent constitutional organ whose substantive instruments — the initiation of ex ante constitutional review and the return of a law for reconsideration — exist regardless of who sits in the chair. These instruments are either put to use or they are not. The candidate’s CV does not anticipate the answer in either direction; the debate about the person therefore distracts attention from precisely what will be measurable over the next five years.

Part II — Literature foundation

The debate is best ordered with three conceptual instruments building on one another. Joseph Raz (Israeli-British legal philosopher, one of the most influential twentieth-century representatives of legal positivism) shows in his volume of essays The Authority of Law that the rule of law is not a synonym for good law but a formal quality: the requirement that law be capable of guiding people’s conduct. The fourth of the eight principles derived from this is explicitly the guarantee of judicial independence: here security of tenure is not a secondary technical question but a condition of maintaining the rule of law. This is precisely the regulatory gap that the present candidate’s own case brought to light. The second layer is the European Convention on Human Rights, whose Articles 6 and 10 the Strasbourg court found to have been violated in the Baka case, and whose Article 46 makes execution of the judgment an obligation of the contracting states and entrusts supervision of this to the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe — that is, execution is not a question of political gesture but an obligation of international law. The third layer is a counter-test: the work Spin Dictators by economist Sergei Guriev and political scientist Daniel Treisman describes the pattern in which formal institutions remain untouched while their content is hollowed out — on their observation, institutions do not work by themselves. This warning also holds in reverse: a symbolically strong nomination does not in itself fill the office with content. The detailed treatment of the literature — author by author, with quotations — can be found in the 6.4 Literature in detail section.

📖 Source: Joseph Raz: The Authority of Law; The European Convention on Human Rights — Articles 6, 10 and 46; Sergei Guriev – Daniel Treisman: Spin Dictators

Part III — MIAK’s concrete proposal

MIAK proposes three measurable measures. None of them is about the person of the candidate, and all three would apply in exactly the same way in an opposite political configuration.

3.1 A public commitment on the use of instruments before the vote (by 11 August 2026)

Before the vote the candidate would do well to set out in writing, publicly, in which cases he intends to make use of the two substantive instruments of the presidential office: returning a law for reconsideration and initiating ex ante constitutional review at the Constitutional Court. What is needed is not a list of promises but a set of criteria: for example the commitment that he will send for ex ante review every law whose adoption took place within a specified time from submission, without substantive committee debate, or which terminates a legal relationship with retroactive effect. This criterion works because its application does not depend on the political direction of the law. The commitment is not a constitutional obligation — and precisely for that reason it is a strong signal: the candidate undertakes something to which he cannot be compelled. In Raz’s framework (see 6.4.1) this shifts the presidential office from the role of formal signatory towards that of a control point defending the predictability of law. This is the application of the logic of the I10 constitutionality stress test to a single office.

The nomination will be more than a symbolic gesture if the nominating majority also remedies the regulatory gap which made the removal possible at the time. Concretely: in the autumn session it has to be settled that there be an effective judicial remedy against the premature termination of the mandate of court leaders, and that organisational restructuring cannot in itself serve as legal ground for terminating a leadership mandate. In the Hungarian legal system this requires amendment of the regulation on the legal status and remuneration of judges, and it is also in line with the execution obligation supervised by the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe (see 6.4.2). The addressee of the measure is Parliament and the ministry responsible for justice — the President of the Republic is not a legislator in this process, at most an initiating and signing actor, so the commitment has to be made on the legislator’s side. This is the measurable, date-bound element of the I4 protection of judicial independence programme point.

3.3 An annual presidential report on the use of instruments (first time by August 2027)

MIAK proposes that the Office of the President of the Republic publish annually a short, quantified summary of how many laws the president returned for reconsideration, in how many cases he initiated ex ante constitutional review, in how many of these the Constitutional Court upheld the initiative, and in how many appointment proposals he requested supplementary information from the proposer. The report does not qualify and does not politicise; it does one single thing, comparing the set of criteria undertaken in point 3.1 with actual practice. This is the document which makes visible in good time the hollowing-out pattern described by Guriev and Treisman (see 6.4.3): if the criteria undertaken are met but the number of interventions remains zero, that is telling in itself. The form of publication is the data-driven complement of the A6 strengthening of checks and balances programme point, and on the measurement side one possible input indicator of the A9 spin-dictatorship prevention index.

The three proposals are bound together by a single principle: the value of a public-law office is given not by the past of the person holding it but by whether the instruments assigned to the office are put to use, and whether that use is verifiable from outside. The CV is a one-off given; the commitment and the report, by contrast, can be examined afresh year by year. This difference is what will make the present nomination, in the long run, either a turning point or an episode.

Part IV — Expected effects and risks

Dimension Expected effect Risk
Legal system Predictable, criteria-based use of ex ante constitutional review improves the quality of legislation already before entry into force A frequently exercised presidential veto and review initiative slows legislation and brings political conflict into an office which bears it badly given its integrating function
Public administration Settling the rules on the legal status of judges makes the position of court leaders more predictable and closes the Strasbourg execution case The rewriting of the regulation can also be carried out in line with the interests of the present majority; the guarantee is durable only if the remedy works independently of person and direction
External relations Closing the execution dossier strengthens Hungary’s position in EU and Council of Europe rule-of-law debates If the nomination appears as a substitute for execution, that weakens rather than strengthens the Hungarian argument at international forums

The gravest question of judgement is whether symbolic and substantive settlement may cancel each other out. A nomination which raises the removed judge to the highest public-law office is a strong public message — and precisely for that reason the temptation arises that the harder, technical legislative work be left undone, because the message has “already happened”. The judgment of the European Court of Human Rights, however, is not about the rehabilitation of the person but about the fact that in the Hungarian legal system the person concerned could not make use of a remedy. No single election makes up for this deficiency: the standard of execution is the general rule, not individual redress. There is a risk in the opposite direction too: if the candidate makes the commitment on the use of instruments now proposed, but in the coming years the majority demands it of him as an obligation along political lines, that undermines the independence of the presidential office. The commitment therefore has to be criteria-based — with pre-fixed, neutral conditions — and not case-based.

Part V — Measurability and summary

5.1 What is worth tracking? (proposed KPIs)

Four proposed performance indicators (KPIs, Key Performance Indicators) from which, in one and in two years, it will be visible whether the office has also been strengthened in substance:

  • Did the public commitment on the use of instruments appear by the day of the vote? A binary indicator, document-based, not opinion-dependent.
  • The annual number of presidential returns and ex ante constitutional review initiatives in the first twelve months from taking office, compared with the number of laws meeting the criteria undertaken. The ratio is what matters, not the absolute number.
  • Did Parliament adopt by December 2026 the amendment providing an effective judicial remedy against the premature termination of a court leadership mandate.
  • Did the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe close the supervision of execution in the Baka v. Hungary case by the end of 2027. This is the only indicator determined by a non-Hungarian actor, and therefore the hardest to influence.

5.2 Summary

MIAK’s message: Tuesday’s vote is not about who deserves the office but about what it will be used for. Concretely, it asks the candidate to make public before the vote the neutral criteria under which he will return laws and initiate ex ante constitutional review; it asks Parliament to settle in the autumn session the remedy rules relating to the removal of court leaders; and it asks the public that a year from now it look not at the inaugural speech but at the figures on the use of instruments.

Two MIAK foundational values move in this matter. Ideology-free judgement, because the standard now proposed is worth something only if it would be the same in a reversed political configuration: if another majority put forward a president without a rival candidate, MIAK would ask for literally the same commitment and the same report. The candidate’s CV — together with the Strasbourg judgment — is neither a justification nor an objection, but a biographical fact independent of the office. And accountability, because the use of presidential instruments cannot today be followed publicly on a regular basis: the annual report is the only document which makes it retrievable at any time over the next five years what the president in office undertook and what he did. The two together make it possible for there to be something to say about this nomination not only in the week of the inauguration but in 2031 as well.

Part VI — Justifications and further sources

6.1 The press framing by spectrum

The liberal-left band worked out the legal-historical background of the nomination in the greatest detail. In a separate analysis Telex reconstructed the course of the 2011 removal — the amendment inserted at the last moment into the transitional provisions of the Fundamental Law, the exclusion of constitutional review, the provision of the courts act which extended the appointment of almost every judge except that of the president of the Supreme Court — and quoted the objections made at the time by rights organisations. 444.hu, by contrast, placed opposition reactions at the centre, that is, the reception of the nomination rather than its antecedent. HVG worked up the candidate’s life course in the form of a portrait, and drew attention to the fact that election without a rival candidate has occurred several times in the past 36 years — this framing places the present situation in the continuity of post-transition practice, and does not present it as exceptional.

The public-affairs band chose the candidate’s own words. 24.hu published a long interview with Baka, in which he spoke about his predecessor, the prospects of the new constitution and the order of magnitude of corruption losses, and in another article made the speed of the governing-party reactions the subject of the news. ATV ran two contrasting voices side by side: in one Péter Róna praised the candidate from the point of view of personal credibility, in the other it examined the political message of the nomination. In the economic band Portfolio remained the driest: it set out the timetable of taking office and the candidate’s professional CV, without political assessment.

The conservative band ran two clearly separate threads. One is the legal qualification of the candidate’s role: Magyar Nemzet took into its headline the claim of the Fidesz parliamentary group leader that the candidate contributes to the building of prime ministerial arbitrary rule, while Mandiner, following a Czech paper, wrote about the legal uncertainty surrounding the election. The other thread is biographical: both papers brought up the Tata volley-firing trial, in which the candidate as a Strasbourg judge took a position in favour of one of the convicted persons. This thread essentially did not appear in the other bands — a substantive gap, because discussing the earlier judicial decisions of a person nominated to a public-law office is a legitimate question; at the same time the framing does not distinguish the legal reasoning of the decision from its political reading. Mandiner added to this a remarkable opening, unusual even within its own band, writing that the present system began with the candidate’s removal and ends with his election as President of the Republic. Overall: the left and centre seek the justification of the nomination, the conservative side its risks, and neither band asks the question of what concrete instruments the elected president will use.

6.2 Facts and data

Item Value Source
Day of the parliamentary group decision 8 August 2026, secret ballot Telex, 8 August 2026
Age of the candidate 73 years (born in 1952, in Budapest) Telex, 8 August 2026
Judicial service in Strasbourg 1991–2008, over two terms Telex, 8 August 2026
Election as president of the Supreme Court 2009, on the proposal of President of the Republic László Sólyom Telex, 8 August 2026
Removal end of 2011, three and a half years before the expiry of the six-year mandate Telex, 8 August 2026
The Strasbourg judgment 2014 (Chamber), June 2016 (final); violation of Articles 6 and 10 of the Convention Telex, 8 August 2026
Compensation awarded 9.5 million forints (a fraction of the 224 million forint pecuniary and 6 million forint non-pecuniary claim) Telex, 8 August 2026
Execution status the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe has been requiring execution of the judgment since 2016 Telex, 8 August 2026
Recommendations supporting the nomination Péter Magyar and 42 further governing-party members Telex, 8 August 2026
Recommendations needed for nomination at least one fifth of the members = 40 persons Fundamental Law Article 11 (2); 199-member Parliament
Size of the governing-party group 141 seats in the 199-member Parliament National Election Office (NVI), finalisation of 19 April 2026
Election at the first vote the votes of two thirds of the members = 133 persons Fundamental Law Article 11 (3)
Day of the vote Tuesday 11 August 2026 Telex, Portfolio, 8 August 2026
Taking office the eighth day following the announcement of the result = 19 August 2026 Telex, 8 August 2026
Duration of the mandate until the entry into force of the new constitution, at most five years Seventeenth amendment of the Fundamental Law
Size of the Mi Hazánk group 6 seats — cannot nominate a candidate on its own NVI, 19 April 2026; Telex

Two figures deserve separate attention. One is the 9.5 million forints of compensation awarded: this is a fraction of the amount claimed, and shows well that the Strasbourg procedure is not about individual redress but about establishing the violation — the object of the execution obligation is therefore not the money but the general measure, that is, the elimination of the absence of a remedy. The other is the relation of 141 and 133: the governing-party group on its own exceeds the two-thirds threshold, so the boycott does not affect the outcome of the vote. Every further step — the public commitment, the legislative settlement — can therefore only be undertaken voluntarily; there is no legal compulsion behind it.

6.3 Policy dimensions

  • Justice (programme points) — the remedy against the termination of a court leadership mandate and the measurement of presidential use of instruments (programme point ID: I4, I10, I9);
  • Transparency and anti-corruption policy (programme points) — data-based tracking of the actual functioning of checks and balances (programme point ID: A6, A9);
  • Public administration and e-government (programme points) — the procedure for filling public-law offices and the professional criteria for leadership mandates (programme point ID: KI7);
  • Foreign policy (background material) — handling of the Strasbourg execution dossier at EU and Council of Europe forums.

6.4 Literature in detail

6.4.1 Joseph Raz: The Authority of Law

Raz’s central thesis is that the rule of law is not identical with good law, and is not a collective name for all political virtues either. As he puts it: “the rule of law is just one of the virtues which a legal system may possess and by which it is to be judged” — indeed, a legal system may meet the requirement of the rule of law excellently while being bad in other respects. The basic idea is instead formal and precise: “the law must be capable of guiding the behaviour of its subjects”. From this he derives the eight principles, of which the fourth is decisive from the point of view of the present case: judicial independence must be guaranteed, and Raz explicitly names the rules serving this — the manner of appointment of judges, security of tenure, the fixing of remuneration and the conditions of service — as intended to ensure that judges be free of all external pressure. Translated to the Hungarian situation this means that terminating the mandate of a court leader by individual legislation and without remedy is not a stylistic question of the rule of law but a direct violation of one of its basic principles — and the violation is remedied not by the person concerned later receiving a high office, but by the rule changing.

📖 Source: Joseph Raz: The Authority of Law

6.4.2 The European Convention on Human Rights

In the present case the Convention is not only the basis for establishing the violation but also the legal frame of what follows. Under Article 10 (1) “everyone has the right to freedom of expression”, and this right includes the freedom to hold opinions and to impart information and ideas without interference by public authority — this is precisely what the Strasbourg court found violated when it established that the court leader had been removed because of his professional opinion. From the point of view of what follows, however, Article 46 is decisive: under it the contracting parties “undertake to abide by the final judgment of the Court in any case to which they are parties”, and the final judgment has to be transmitted to the Committee of Ministers, which supervises its execution. The further paragraphs of the article also provide that if in the Committee’s view a state refuses to comply with a judgment, it may by a two-thirds vote refer to the Court the question whether the state has failed to fulfil its obligation. In the Hungarian case this supervisory procedure has been open since 2016. The nomination therefore does not take its place: the standard of execution is the general measure, that is, the creation of the possibility of a remedy, and this standard can be met exclusively by legislation.

📖 Source: The European Convention on Human Rights — Articles 6, 10 and 46

6.4.3 Guriev and Treisman: Spin Dictators

The joint book of economist Sergei Guriev and political scientist Daniel Treisman takes issue with the widely shared assumption that the existence of democratic institutions in itself protects. As they write, elections, “the system of constitutional checks and balances, legal procedures and an independent judiciary” are indeed important, but “formal institutions do not work by themselves. They often fail to constrain leaders.” The book’s main observation is that modern autocrats do not abolish democratic institutions but hide the exercise of power behind their façades — they keep the forms and empty out the content. This observation can be used in two directions in the present case. On the one hand it explains why the 2011 removal was formally lawful and yet unlawful: the technique of constitutional amendment used precisely formal regularity for an individual removal. On the other hand it also serves as a counter-test for the present situation: if over five years the new president returns not a single law and initiates not a single constitutional review, then the office remains just as formally intact and substantively empty, regardless of how strong a symbol his election was. This is why MIAK proposes the measurable annual report, rather than the assessment of declarations of intent.

📖 Source: Sergei Guriev – Daniel Treisman: Spin Dictators

6.5 International comparison

On the question of the removability of court leaders, European practice points in a relatively uniform direction: a procedure tied to the opinion of judicial self-governing bodies, burdened with an obligation to give reasons and challengeable before a court is the established pattern, and where this is absent, Strasbourg case law regularly establishes a violation of the right to a fair trial. The international significance of the Baka case comes precisely from the fact that it declared the total absence of a remedy unlawful — that is, it is about the reviewability of the removal, not about whether it was justified.

On the execution side it is instructive that in supervisory procedures the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe consistently distinguishes individual and general measures. The individual measure is the remedying of the situation of the person concerned, the general measure is the legislative amendment excluding repetition of the violation. Experience shows that dossiers typically get stuck on the general measure, because that carries a political cost, while individual redress is cheaper and more visible. This distinction explains why the present nomination is not sufficient in itself: in the sense of international law it cannot even be classed in the individual category, because it does not relate to the judicial legal relationship. The most useful point of comparison from the Hungarian point of view is therefore not the presidential election practice of another country but that of those states which closed similar execution dossiers by legislative amendment — there the average length of the procedure shows that the present case, open since 2016, already counts as an outlier.

Justice

  • I4 — Protection of judicial independence
  • I9 — Popular-sovereignty audit — legislation with citizen feedback
  • I10 — Constitutionality ‘stress test’

Transparency and anti-corruption policy

  • A6 — Strengthening checks and balances
  • A9 — Spin-dictatorship prevention index

Public administration and e-government

  • KI7 — Official selection and rotation system

Proposed new programme point: Annual presidential report on the use of instruments — for the Justice area, with annual quantified publication of returns, ex ante constitutional review initiatives and appointment procedures.

6.7 List of sources

Press sources (MIAK press monitor, 9 August 2026 — topic 1):

Knowledge-base references (books and sources of law):

  • 📖 Joseph Raz: The Authority of Law
  • 📖 The European Convention on Human Rights — Articles 6, 10 and 46
  • 📖 Sergei Guriev – Daniel Treisman: Spin Dictators
  • 📖 Fundamental Law of Hungary (text in force) — Articles 10-11

Note: the local file path of the books does not appear in the visible text of the blog — only the author and the title. The file path is an internal matter of the generation process, not the reader’s.

MIAK internal materials:

  • MIAK policy area: Justice (programme points; programme point ID: I4, I10)
  • MIAK policy area: Transparency and anti-corruption policy (programme points; programme point ID: A6)
  • MIAK policy area: Public administration and e-government (programme points; programme point ID: KI7)
  • MIAK press monitor, 9 August 2026 — topic 1, score: 95/100

Additional public data sources (where used):

  • Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe — database on the execution of ECtHR judgments; resolution register of the Office of Parliament; National Election Office 2026 result data

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