Orban tightens grip on Hungary courts

Bloomberg

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s long march towards one-man rule in the heart of the European Union hit a new milestone.
Shrugging off the threat of sanctions from Brussels, Orban’s lawmakers approved a law that will further tighten his hold over the country’s court system. Opposition lawmakers tried to prevent the opening of the parliamentary session and then whistled and jeered as the ruling coalition voted to create a new high court to deal with public-
administration cases and brought it under the government’s oversight.
A third-consecutive election win in April gave Orban, 55, and his Fidesz party a constitutional majority, which made the vote a formality. The re-election also gave Orban a self-claimed mandate to continue the NATO member’s transformation into an
“illiberal state” along the lines of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, frustrating EU efforts to maintain the unity underpinning the world’s largest trading bloc.
“We’re long past the point of no return when it comes to salvaging the rule of law, but even so, the creation of this rubber-stamp court is alarming,” said Mate Szabo, a lawyer at Hungary’s Civil Liberties Union. “The EU has been totally unprepared to deal with it.”

Political Influence
The legislation strips the supreme court of its ultimate authority over so-called administrative disputes — cases involving everything from elections and corruption to taxes and police abuse — and creates a new court overseen by his justice minister.
In filing the bill to parliament, Justice Minister Laszlo Trocsanyi pledged to respect the “principle of judicial independence and separation of powers.” But he also said he needed to take “greater political responsibility” over the administrative courts. He’ll pick the new court’s judges and control its budget.
Orban has capitalised on a seemingly endless series of crises elsewhere in Europe to consolidate power. When he returned to the premiership in 2010, it was the Greek debt crisis and the survival of the euro. More recently it’s been Britain’s tortuous attempt to leave the EU, France’s violent protests and the challenge to the bloc’s budget rules posed by Italy’s new populist government.
It took the EU’s parliament until September to say that it had amassed enough evidence to recommend an investigation because of the “clear risk” to the rule of law under Orban. That put Hungary in the same category as Poland, which is also being probed for flouting what the EU refers to as democratic values.