EUR;CoE;EU;CECC;JCCJ;WCCJa) Hungary / b) Constitutional Court / c) / d) 06-04-2016 / e) 7/2016 / f) On the amendment to the Act on postal services / g) Magyar Közlöny (Official Gazette), 2016/47 / h) .
Keywords of the systematic thesaurus:
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General Principles - Certainty of the law.
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Fundamental Rights - Civil and political rights - Right to information.
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Keywords of the alphabetical index:
Postal service, national, operation / Public disclosure, scope.
Headnotes:
Changes made to legislation on postal services affecting the scope of public disclosure at the state-owned Hungarian Post are compliant with the Constitution.
Summary:
1. On 9 March, the President declined to sign the act adopted by Parliament on restricting public access to information concerning the national postal service, simply citing the retroactive effect of the amendments to the act on postal services as justification for sending that legislation to the Constitutional Court.
The main thrust of the provisions on Post Office spending is publicity, although Magyar Posta (the state-owned Hungarian Post) has the competence to make business secrets confidential if their disclosure would cause disproportionate harm to business activity. This could particularly be the case where disclosing the data would create an undue advantage for competitors.
II. The Constitutional Court acknowledged that the new legal rule had retrospective effect, but not with a view to disadvantage, which meant it was not unconstitutional. Moreover, it is within the competence of the ordinary courts to decide whether disclosing certain data would cause disproportionate harm or result in undue advantage.
Hungarian.