Sulyok Tamás has become the President of Hungary on 24 March this year. Before taking office, he had made many notable contributions to the realm of law, trying to find the balance between the hegemony of EU law and the constitutional courts of the member states. As President of the Hungarian Constitutional Court, this has been a major leitmotif in his entire carrier and remains so even today as President of the Republic.
In a statement made during a meeting organized by Slovenia for the heads of its neighbour states, Hungarian President Tamás Sulyok declared that ‘Hungary won’t abandon its sovereignty’, and strongly opposed any EU federalization tendencies. He expressed his belief that
turning the EU into one superstate would only weaken both the member states and the continent as a whole.
He continued by saying: ‘Our different opinions on Europe do not divide us, but unite us; we believe that Europe’s strength is based on dialogue, and we Hungarians are open to all discourse’.
Albeit these statements came somewhat as a surprise to the Hungarian press who had not been intimately familiar with Tamás Sulyok and his work before he was elected President, in fact his statements reflect the academic work he has been doing as one of the most prominent lawyers of the country, including as a justice of the Constitutional Court of Hungary from 2014 to 2016 and as its head from 2016 until 2024.
The approach advocated for by Tamás Sulyok is not the reverse of the European Court of Justice’s primacy over national constitutional courts. Contrary to the view of some misguided alarmists, Sulyok did not argue for the unquestionable primacy of the Hungarian interpretation of national constitutions over the European. In fact, in Sulyok Tamás’s view, the relations between the two does not have to be hierarchical at all, with one having the ultimate interpretative power with regards to the constitutions of the EU member states. Even before his presidency, Tamás Sulyok had worked on the idea of sharing the authority between the national constitutional courts (in the case of Hungary, Alkotmánybíróság, that is, the Hungarian Constitutional Court) and the European Court of Justice, endorsing the idea of resolving any conflicts that may arise in interpretation ‘based on dialogue and composite constitutionality’.
During a European legal conference, Sulyok argued that: ‘In general, it can be established that this approach [where Member States are the exclusive arbiters of decisions on national sovereignty] is too rigid, does not stimulate harmonization and may cause a stalemate.’ Admitting that global challenges, such as mass migration and global warming require at least in part cross-border solutions and cannot be solved by nation states all by themselves, he acknowledged that the lack of cooperation may hurt nation states’ own interests. At the same time, he argued, it is crucial to be committed to protecting national sovereignty from the obvious excesses that the sole uncountable dominance of the EU interpretation might cause. Considering these, Tamás Sulyok suggested a middle ground between the two one-sided approaches:
‘If we want to handle this conflict successfully, a multi-level and network-based approach is needed instead of a hierarchical relationship between the ECJ and the constitutional courts of the Member States, and a respectful dialogue must be developed between the ECJ and the constitutional courts of the Member States (Verfassungsgerichtsverbund)…the absolute interpretation of the ECJ may harm human dignity through the erosion of national identity and alienate the citizenry from the EU project…participation in the EU cannot result in depriving people of the control of public power, especially in cases related to national identities…However, we also have to admit that excessive and unreasonable reliance on the concept of sovereignty may lead to undesirable consequences and futile debates due to the high number of the Member States.’
In his speech President Sulyok went on arguing that
as the dignity of each individual is respected, so should their national identities be respected as well.
Each individual is born into a specific nation and circumstances and form their surroundings with their choices—as the individual’s basic human rights are ensured (right to education, right to freely practice one’s religion etc), so should their national identity be respected. According to Sulyok and the Hungarian Constitutional Court, the cornerstone to achieving the desired balance between the national and the European courts is the institutionalization of constitutional dialogue.
For that, the Hungarian Constitutional Court has established a working group in order to facilitate constitutional dialogue between the national constitutional courts.
As Sulyok Tamás previously elaborated in his interview with Hungarian Conservative, strengthening relations between the national constitutional courts and other equivalent judicial forums of the member states on one hand and the European Court of Justice on the other reflects Hungary’s stance on the preferable course of European integration. Only when national Courts and the European Court of Justice are all engaged in polycentric networking can the very institutional structure of the relationship between all the aforementioned agents facilitate the diversity of values, which is a vital element of European identity, enshrined in multiple documents fundamental to the EU’s creation. Should the EU take a more federalist approach having the European Court of Justice’s interpretation prevail over the national, the very European idea would be compromised:
‘The diversity of values is a defining element of European identity, a tangible expression of unity in diversity. This does not weaken our Europeanism, but strengthens it.’
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