Abstract
In 2012, Hungary enacted a new Criminal Code. The Fidesz government intended this law to embody their ‘new’, i. e. stricter criminal policy. The core piece of that policy, a sort of ‘three-strikes-and-you-are out’ rule, was very soon struck down by the then still independent Constitutional Court. In general, the code has the tendency to impose higher punishments than its precursor, but we can find the opposite tendency as well, in particular in the field of petty crime against material values. Life-long imprisonment may mean now imprisonment until death without release; the European Court of Human Rights, however, mitigated some of the more inhuman traits of that concept. In another point, the code openly contradicts several judgements of the ECtHR: using the red star continues to be a crime in Hungary. In the General Part it is noticeable that the code continues the socialist category of ‘dangerous to the society’. In the timeline prior to the attempt of a crime lies the ‘preparation’ of a crime which is now punishable in quite a few cases. For some crimes, the age of responsibility was lowered from 14 to 12 years. The Special Part is not so very different from other continental criminal codes. It contains a large number of ‘modern’ crimes such as genetic or medical crimes or violations of international sanctions. These provisions have been an empty shell so far. Also the quite impressive range of corruption crimes has remained inactive because the Procurator General defines his principal task to protect the inner power circle and their oligarchs from indictments of their - more and more overt - corrupt practices. In some cases special provisions support various government policies, e.g. the crimes protecting the border fence on the southern border, the punishment of persons and organisations who help refugees, or, quite recently, the highly conflictual paragraph on media coverage of anti-corona measures which, i. a. due to its vagueness, may be abused in order to silence critical journalism.
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