Chapter VI: Bíróságok (The Courts)

Overview

Chapter VI funds the ordinary court system of Hungary, the Kúria (the Supreme Court / Curia), the Országos Bírói Tanács (National Judicial Council), and a small set of fejezeti kezelésű előirányzatok (chapter-managed appropriations) covering judicial-sector capital investment, operation, and litigation-cost reserves. Total expenditure for 2026 is 218,351.0 millió Ft against own-revenue of 3,069.1 millió Ft, leaving a net call on general taxation of 215,281.9 millió Ft.

This is, in classical-liberal terms, one of the least contestable chapters in the budget. Independent adjudication of disputes and the enforcement of contract and property rights is a rights-protection function — not a candidate for retrenchment but a precondition for the market order that makes retrenchment elsewhere coherent.¹ Smith and Buchanan both place it at the foundation of the classical-liberal state. A capital stock cannot deepen, a contract cannot be relied upon, and property cannot be secure without courts that resolve disputes predictably and enforce judgments. The analytical task here is therefore not to ask whether the function should be financed involuntarily — it plainly should — but to confirm that each line funds the rights-protection function itself rather than something adjacent to it, and to be honest about the one structural finding the chapter contains: a court system this expensive relative to peers is usually a court system the rest of the state has overloaded.

Expenditure Analysis

Bíróságok — Személyi juttatások (Ordinary Courts — Personnel Expenditures)

• Current allocation: 150,994.6 millió Ft

• Classification: Keep

• Rationale: This is the salary base of the working judiciary — judges, court secretaries, clerks, and administrative staff across the járásbíróság, törvényszék, and ítélőtábla tiers. Adjudication is the archetypal rights-protection function: the enforcement of contract and the secure resolution of property disputes is what makes voluntary exchange and capital formation possible in the first place. There is no calculation-problem objection to financing it, because the budget is not trying to price a contestable output against subjective consumer preference — it is funding the constitutional machinery through which disputes are resolved. The honest classical-liberal position is that this is core state, and the line is kept.

  Keep does not mean exempt from scrutiny. The size of this line relative to the chapter — 69% of the entire judicial envelope is the ordinary-court payroll — is itself a signal worth reading. A judiciary is expensive in proportion to the volume of disputes the rest of the legal and administrative order pushes through it. Where the state criminalises conduct that need not be criminal, multiplies licensing regimes whose breach generates litigation, or operates monopolies and discretionary allocation schemes whose contested awards end up before administrative courts, the court payroll rises as a downstream cost. The line stays; but a leaner state upstream is what eventually makes the line itself lighter, and that is a finding for the chapters that generate the caseload, not for this one.

• Transition mechanism: None. Operating-efficiency review of court administration (case-management systems, the ratio of administrative to judicial staff) is appropriate and continuous; it is not a phase-out.

• Affected groups: None adversely. Every party to a contract, every property owner, and every defendant relies on this function.

Bíróságok — Munkaadókat terhelő járulékok és szociális hozzájárulási adó (Ordinary Courts — Employer Contributions and Social Contribution Tax)

• Current allocation: 20,682.2 millió Ft

• Classification: Keep

• Rationale: The employer-side social contribution (szociális hozzájárulási adó, levied at 13% on the gross wage bill) and related employer charges attached to the court payroll. It is an accounting consequence of the personnel line and follows its classification: the courts are kept, so the employer wedge on their payroll is kept.

  It is worth naming what this line is, because it recurs in every ministry and institutional chapter and is rarely seen for what it is. The 20,682.2 millió Ft here is not a separate programme — it is the cost the state imposes on itself as an employer, the same wedge it imposes on every private employer in the country. For a court clerk whose work the state values at 100 forints of total employer cost, roughly 13 of those forints are consumed by this contribution before the clerk’s gross wage is even calculated; SZJA at 15% and the employee social-insurance contribution of 18.5% then take their share of what remains, so that of every 100 forints of employer cost only about 59 reach the clerk as take-home pay, and 27% of that take-home is captured again at the till through ÁFA at 27% on most spending. The cumulative wedge on a public-sector wage is in the same 55–60% range as on a private one. The line is kept because the courts are kept; the observation that belongs in the whitepaper is that the size of the state’s own payroll-tax bill is a measure of how heavy the wedge is for everyone.

• Transition mechanism: None.

• Affected groups: None adversely.

Bíróságok — Dologi kiadások (Ordinary Courts — Operating Expenditures)

• Current allocation: 28,782.6 millió Ft

• Classification: Keep

• Rationale: Materials, utilities, IT services, building running costs, postage, expert-witness fees, and the other recurrent non-personnel costs of operating the court network. These are the unavoidable operating inputs of a kept function. There is no rights-protection objection to financing the heating, lighting, and case-management software of a courthouse.

  This is the line where operating-efficiency review has the most purchase, and Keep should not be read as “above examination”. Court digitisation — electronic filing, remote hearings where due process permits, automated case-allocation — offers the most promising route to continuous operating-efficiency improvement without touching the rights-protection core. The line is kept at its current level; the recommendation is continuous procurement and process review, not a budget-line cut.

• Transition mechanism: None. Ongoing operating-efficiency review.

• Affected groups: None adversely.

Bíróságok — Ellátottak pénzbeli juttatásai (Ordinary Courts — Cash Benefits to Recipients)

• Current allocation: 71.4 millió Ft
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: A minor line covering cash payments administered through the courts to specified recipients — typically statutory payments to lay judges, jurors, or witnesses, or court-administered benefit transfers. At 71.4 millió Ft it is 0.03% of the chapter and is functionally part of the cost of operating proceedings. It follows the court function and is kept; its size does not warrant a separate transition analysis.
• Transition mechanism: None.
• Affected groups: None.

Bíróságok — Beruházások (Ordinary Courts — Capital Investments)

• Current allocation: 1,396.2 millió Ft
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: Capital investment in the ordinary-court estate and equipment — courthouse construction and refurbishment, IT hardware, security installations. Capital expenditure on the infrastructure of a kept rights-protection function is itself kept. The capital stock of a courthouse is not a discretionary subsidy; it is the physical precondition of the function.
• Transition mechanism: None. Subject to standard capital-project appraisal.
• Affected groups: None.

Bíróságok — Felújítások (Ordinary Courts — Renovations)

• Current allocation: 266.0 millió Ft
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: Renovation and maintenance of existing court buildings. As with Beruházások, this is the upkeep of the physical infrastructure of a kept function. Keeping a courthouse weatherproof and functional is not a candidate for phase-out.
• Transition mechanism: None.
• Affected groups: None.

Kúria — Személyi juttatások (Curia — Personnel Expenditures)

• Current allocation: 8,788.2 millió Ft

• Classification: Keep

• Rationale: The salary base of the Kúria, Hungary’s supreme judicial body, responsible for ensuring the uniform application of law through its review jurisdiction and its uniformity decisions (jogegységi határozatok). A court of final instance that resolves divergent interpretations of law is part of the rights-protection architecture: predictability of adjudication depends on a body that settles conflicting lower-court interpretations. The line is kept.

  The classical-liberal frame is institution-blind on the question of who sits on the court — it asks only whether the function is a legitimate state function, and final-instance adjudication is. Debates about the appointment process for the Kúria’s president and about the court’s independence are real and consequential, but they are governance questions about how the kept institution is constituted, not budget-classification questions. The function is financed; the institutional-design questions belong to constitutional reform, not to the expenditure taxonomy.

• Transition mechanism: None.

• Affected groups: None adversely.

Kúria — Munkaadókat terhelő járulékok és szociális hozzájárulási adó (Curia — Employer Contributions and Social Contribution Tax)

• Current allocation: 939.0 millió Ft
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: The employer wedge on the Kúria payroll. Follows the personnel line: the Kúria is kept, so the social-contribution charge on its payroll is kept.
• Transition mechanism: None.
• Affected groups: None.

Kúria — Dologi kiadások (Curia — Operating Expenditures)

• Current allocation: 840.8 millió Ft
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: Recurrent operating costs of the Kúria — premises, IT, legal databases, publication of uniformity decisions. Operating inputs of a kept function; kept, subject to ordinary procurement discipline.
• Transition mechanism: None.
• Affected groups: None.

Kúria — Egyéb működési célú kiadások (Curia — Other Operating Expenditures)

• Current allocation: 2.2 millió Ft
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: A negligible residual operating line (2.2 millió Ft, 0.001% of the chapter). It follows the Kúria’s classification and does not warrant separate analysis.
• Transition mechanism: None.
• Affected groups: None.

Kúria — Beruházások (Curia — Capital Investments)

• Current allocation: 440.3 millió Ft
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: Capital investment in the Kúria’s premises and equipment. Infrastructure of a kept function; kept.
• Transition mechanism: None. Standard capital-project appraisal.
• Affected groups: None.

Országos Bírói Tanács — Személyi juttatások (National Judicial Council — Personnel Expenditures)

• Current allocation: 691.2 millió Ft

• Classification: Keep

• Rationale: The Országos Bírói Tanács (National Judicial Council, OBT) is the elected self-governance body of the Hungarian judiciary. It is composed of judges elected by their peers and exercises oversight of judicial administration, including a supervisory role over the president of the Országos Bírósági Hivatal (National Office for the Judiciary). This is not a discretionary patronage body or an oversight authority bolted on to police a state-constructed market — the category AGENTS.md flags for sceptical examination. It is a constitutional element of judicial self-government, the mechanism by which the judiciary’s independence from the executive is institutionally secured. Securing the independence of the rights-protection function is itself a rights-protection function. The line is kept.

  The distinction matters and is worth drawing precisely, because the framework’s default scepticism toward “oversight bodies” could be mis-applied here. A procurement supervisor exists because the state buys too much; a gambling regulator exists because the state licenses what it need not license — those bodies are symptoms of an over-extended state, and the honest classification phases them out alongside the activity that created them. The OBT is the opposite case: it does not police an over-extended state, it constrains the executive’s reach into the judiciary. A classical-liberal frame that prizes the rule of law and the separation of powers funds exactly this. At 997.8 millió Ft for the whole body — under half of one per cent of the chapter — the fiscal stake is in any case immaterial; the classification is decided on principle, and the principle says keep.

• Transition mechanism: None.

• Affected groups: None adversely.

Országos Bírói Tanács — Munkaadókat terhelő járulékok és szociális hozzájárulási adó (National Judicial Council — Employer Contributions and Social Contribution Tax)

• Current allocation: 89.9 millió Ft
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: The employer wedge on the OBT payroll. Follows the personnel line; kept.
• Transition mechanism: None.
• Affected groups: None.

Országos Bírói Tanács — Dologi kiadások (National Judicial Council — Operating Expenditures)

• Current allocation: 202.4 millió Ft
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: Recurrent operating costs of the OBT — meetings, premises, administrative support. Operating inputs of a kept constitutional body; kept.
• Transition mechanism: None.
• Affected groups: None.

Országos Bírói Tanács — Egyéb működési célú kiadások (National Judicial Council — Other Operating Expenditures)

• Current allocation: 3.0 millió Ft
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: A negligible residual operating line. Follows the OBT classification; kept.
• Transition mechanism: None.
• Affected groups: None.

Országos Bírói Tanács — Beruházások (National Judicial Council — Capital Investments)

• Current allocation: 10.0 millió Ft
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: Minor capital investment for the OBT. Infrastructure of a kept body; kept.
• Transition mechanism: None.
• Affected groups: None.

Országos Bírói Tanács — Felújítások (National Judicial Council — Renovations)

• Current allocation: 1.3 millió Ft
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: A negligible renovation line. Follows the OBT classification; kept.
• Transition mechanism: None.
• Affected groups: None.

Fejezeti kezelésű előirányzatok — Igazságszolgáltatás beruházásai (Chapter-Managed Appropriations — Judicial Capital Investments)

• Current allocation: 2,437.8 millió Ft
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: A chapter-managed capital appropriation funding judicial-sector investment projects centrally rather than through an individual institution’s own Beruházások line — typically larger cross-cutting projects such as court-network IT systems, integrated case-management platforms, or shared infrastructure. It is the capital budget of a kept function and follows the same classification as the institutional capital lines: kept, subject to ordinary capital-project appraisal. The chapter-managed form is an appropriation-routing choice, not a different kind of spending.
• Transition mechanism: None. Standard capital-project appraisal of individual projects.
• Affected groups: None.

Fejezeti kezelésű előirányzatok — Igazságszolgáltatás működtetése (Chapter-Managed Appropriations — Operation of the Justice System)

• Current allocation: 1,561.9 millió Ft
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: A chapter-managed operating appropriation funding cross-cutting operational costs of the justice system that are not carried on an individual court’s own dologi line — shared services, centrally-procured operating inputs, sector-wide programmes. It is the operating budget of a kept function; kept, subject to procurement discipline. As with the capital appropriation above, the chapter-managed routing does not change what the money does.
• Transition mechanism: None. Ongoing operating-efficiency review.
• Affected groups: None.

Fejezeti kezelésű előirányzatok — A polgári peres eljárás elhúzódásával kapcsolatos vagyoni elégtétel és ügyvédi és kamarai jogtanácsosi költségből és pervesztésből eredő kiadások célelőirányzata (Chapter-Managed Appropriations — Earmarked Reserve for Compensation for Excessive Length of Civil Proceedings and for Legal-Cost and Loss-of-Suit Liabilities)

• Current allocation: 150.0 millió Ft

• Classification: Keep

• Rationale: This earmarked reserve (célelőirányzat) funds two related liabilities of the state acting as a litigant and as the operator of the court system. The first is the statutory compensation payable where a civil proceeding has run excessively long — a remedy introduced into Hungarian law for the unreasonable delay of proceedings, the domestic counterpart to the right to trial within a reasonable time. The second is the cost the state bears for legal fees and adverse costs where it loses litigation in which it is a party.

  Both belong to the rights-protection function rather than alongside it. Compensation for excessively delayed proceedings is the state honouring an enforceable individual right against itself — precisely the rule-of-law-against-the-state mechanism a classical-liberal frame treats as core, not as discretionary largesse. Adverse-costs liability is the ordinary consequence of the state being subject to the same litigation rules as any other party; a state that could not lose a suit and pay costs would not be a state under law. The line is kept.

  There is a sharper point hidden in the first half of this reserve, and it belongs in the whitepaper rather than in a recommendation to cut the line. A standing budget reserve for compensating litigants whose cases took too long is the price of a court system carrying more cases than it can resolve promptly. The 150.0 millió Ft is not a failure of this line — the line correctly honours the right — it is a small visible marker of the larger unseen cost of judicial congestion: the businesses whose disputed receivables are frozen for years, the property transactions that cannot complete, the contracts written defensively because enforcement is slow. The reserve is kept because the right is real; the lasting fix for its underlying cause is a lighter caseload, which is the work of the chapters that generate litigation, not of this one.

• Transition mechanism: None.

• Affected groups: None adversely. Litigants with valid delay-compensation claims and counterparties owed costs are the intended recipients.

Revenue Items

Bírósági bevételek (Court Revenues — fees and charges)

• Name: Bírósági működési és felhalmozási bevételek (Court operating and capital revenues)
• Current yield: 3,069.1 millió Ft (3,069.1 millió Ft operating; 0.0 millió Ft capital)
• Type: Fee / Charge
• Notes: The chapter’s own-revenue is reported only at the summary-table level (Hazai működési költségvetés bevétel: 3,069.1 millió Ft; Hazai felhalmozási költségvetés bevétel: 0.0 millió Ft), without a line-by-line breakdown in the chapter tables. It represents institutional revenue generated by court operations — principally court-administered charges, copy and certification fees, and similar service charges. It is distinct from the main procedural duty on litigation (eljárási illeték), which is a central tax revenue booked in the central tax chapter (Chapter XLII), not here. This revenue is a direct fee for a service rendered to an identifiable user, and from a classical-liberal standpoint user-charging for the identifiable, excludable services a court provides (certified copies, specific administrative services) is unobjectionable — it is closer to a price than to a tax. None of the expenditure analysis above proposes cutting a court function, so this revenue stream is unaffected by the recommendations in this chapter: every line is kept, and the fee base that generates the 3,069.1 millió Ft persists.

No major tax revenue items appear in this chapter; the procedural duty on civil litigation and the criminal-justice-related charges are booked centrally in Chapter XLII and analysed there.

Chapter Summary

Classification	Count	Total (millió Ft)
Immediate Cut	0	0.0
Phase-Out	0	0.0
Nominal Freeze	0	0.0
Keep	19	218,351.0
Total	19	218,351.0

Revenue	Total (millió Ft)
Total chapter revenue	3,069.1

Key Observations

• This is core state, and the chapter confirms it. All nineteen line items are classified Keep. Independent adjudication, final- instance review, and the institutional self-government that secures judicial independence are rights-protection functions in the most direct sense: they are the machinery through which contract and property disputes are resolved and through which the state itself is held to law. A classical-liberal budget analysis that recommended retrenchment here would be incoherent — the security of property and contract that justifies retrenchment everywhere else is produced by exactly these institutions.

• Keep is not exemption from efficiency review. Roughly 93% of the chapter is the ordinary courts alone (all six Bíróságok lines sum to 202,193 millió Ft against a chapter total of 218,351 millió Ft), and the largest single line — the ordinary-court payroll at 150,994.6 millió Ft — is 69% of the whole. Court digitisation, case-management modernisation, and procurement discipline on the operating and capital lines are the appropriate continuous disciplines. None of them is a budget-line phase-out; all of them belong to operating-efficiency review of a kept function.

• The size of the judicial budget is a downstream signal, not a finding against this chapter. A judiciary is expensive in proportion to the volume of disputes the rest of the legal and administrative order pushes through it. Where the state criminalises conduct that need not be criminal, multiplies licensing regimes whose breach generates litigation, or runs discretionary allocation and monopoly arrangements whose contested awards reach administrative courts, the court payroll rises as a downstream cost. The honest reading of a 218 milliárd Ft judicial envelope is that a leaner state upstream eventually produces a lighter caseload here — a finding for the chapters that generate litigation, not for this one.

• The delay-compensation reserve is the visible tip of an unseen cost. The 150.0 millió Ft earmarked for compensating litigants whose civil cases ran excessively long is correctly kept — it honours an enforceable individual right against the state. But its existence is a small visible marker of judicial congestion, the unseen cost of which is borne by businesses with frozen receivables, stalled property transactions, and contracts written defensively because enforcement is slow. The reserve is not the problem; the caseload that makes it necessary is.

• The OBT is the right kind of oversight body. AGENTS.md flags oversight and regulatory bodies for sceptical examination — many exist to police symptoms of an over-extended state and should phase out alongside the activity that created them. The Országos Bírói Tanács is the opposite case: it does not police an over-extended state, it constrains the executive’s reach into the judiciary. A frame built on the rule of law and the separation of powers funds exactly this institution; at 997.8 millió Ft the fiscal stake is immaterial and the classification rests on principle.

• The chapter is institution-blind on governance disputes. Debates over the appointment of the Kúria’s president and over judicial independence more broadly are real and consequential, but they are constitutional-design questions about how a kept institution is constituted — not budget-classification questions. The expenditure taxonomy finances the function; the institutional-design questions belong to constitutional reform.

• Revenue note. Chapter own-revenue of 3,069.1 millió Ft is institutional fee and charge income, reported only at summary-table level without a line-by-line breakdown. User-charging for the identifiable, excludable services a court provides is consistent with the analytical frame. The main procedural duty on litigation (eljárási illeték) is a central tax revenue booked in Chapter XLII, not here. Because every expenditure line is kept, the fee base is unaffected by this chapter’s recommendations.

Sources

Footnotes

1. Hayek, F.A. (1960). The Constitution of Liberty. University of Chicago Press. Chapter 14 (“The Safeguards of Individual Liberty”) sets out why the rule of law and independent adjudication are preconditions for, not alternatives to, the market order. ↩