Legitimate Expectations versus Public Interest in Hungarian Context

The protection of legitimate expectations as a general principle of the legal system is not known in Hungary. However, some other constitutional propositions play a similar role like the protection of “acquired rights” and “legal certainty”. Although during the 1990s, the Constitutional Court developed a sophisticated concept of the rules of law, after 2010, when a conservative government coalition gained a two-thirds majority, the whole constitutional system was transformed. Since then, the level of the protection of individual rights, including the legitimate expectations, on behalf of the elusive concept of public interest, has declined. The institutional system of constitutional justice has proved to be weak to resist these trends. The study describes how the protection of legitimate expectations was developed and elucidates the very recent tendencies. The final conclusion of the author is that the Hungarian case can be a deterrent example showing what not to do