Legal Challenges in Respect of Legal Approximation

Legal Challenges in the fields of contract law and competition law connected with the approximation process and modern policies

(a paper at the conference of Perspectives of Legal Approximation Process in Central – Eastern Europe in 2000)

Preface

In this essay I would like to outline the update reforms requested by the legal harmonization and the process of changing in the fields of contract and competition law. By comparing these two fields of our legal system on the one hand I want to render perceptible their differences and the different requirements of the harmonization, on the other I want to present a successful solution of the legislative challenges and – in my point of view– a less successful one.

First of all I must underline that these challenges are based on not only legal but economic and social changes and processes as well. The revision of the former Hungarian regulation was necessitated partly by the metamorphoses in the structure of economy, society, namely by the change–over to market economy. And partly by the harmonizational expectations in the process of the enlargement, which were formulated in many documents. For instance in the Association Agreement (signed in 1991, promulgated in 1993), in the criteria of Copenhagen(1993), in the so-called White Book (1995), in Agenda 2000 and in the Country Report of the Commission (1997).

The duty to approximate to the acquis communautaire

In the Association Agreement the obligation of Hungary was decreed in the spirit of the “soft harmonization” philosophy. In the scope of a comprehensive approximation –program in a reasonable possible manner and extent should be harmonized the Hungarian legal system in its particular fields (mainly in commercial law, in environmental protection, administrative law, consumer protection etc.) The soft harmonization is not the aim of the legal approximation, but the basement of every accession (the essential minimum). This approach of the question is supported by the criteria defined in the Summit Meeting in Copenhagen: 1) functioning and steady democracy 2) functioning market-economy and competitivity in the internal market of the Community 3) the ability to take on the obligations connected with the membership status, which is the most important in legal respect. It means, that Hungary should be ready and capable by the date of the accession to take on the whole legal system of the EU (which involves not only the adequate transposition of the political, economic and monetary purposes and the acquis but the adequate application of their as well). In similar sense formulates the 2358/96 Gov. Dec., which states that Hungary should be ready to transpose the whole acquis and to apply it. So the soft harmonization -obligation of our country must be understood extending: by the date of the accession the legal approximation will have been finished, so that the entrance can go smoothly.

Consumer protection policy

In the law of contracts the essence of these changes is the triumphal march of the consumers' protection policy. We have been able to talk about the classical