Chapter III: Alkotmánybíróság (Constitutional Court)

Overview

This chapter funds the Alkotmánybíróság (Constitutional Court) of Hungary, the body that conducts constitutional review of legislation and adjudicates constitutional complaints. The 2026 allocation is 4,326.9 millió Ft in total: 4,224.4 millió Ft of operating expenditure and 102.5 millió Ft of capital investment. The chapter records no own-revenue — the court levies no fees and produces no charges.

By the standard of the chapters that follow, this is a small envelope. It is also one of the most straightforward to classify. The Constitutional Court is not a discretionary-allocation body, not a regulator standing in for a missing market, and not a transfer mechanism to an organised constituency. It is the institution through which a written constitution is given binding force against the legislature and the executive. Within the classical-liberal tradition, the line between a state that secures rights and a state that merely commands is drawn precisely here: an enforceable constraint on the legislature, justiciable by an organ that the legislature cannot overrule by ordinary majority. That function is a constitutional precondition, not a programme. The analysis below treats the chapter as a Keep in its entirety, and the more useful work is to be exact about why — and about where the institutional design, rather than the budget line, carries the risk.

Expenditure Analysis

Alkotmánybíróság — Személyi juttatások (Personnel Expenditures)

• Current allocation: 3,000.1 millió Ft
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: This line pays the fifteen constitutional judges and the legal and administrative staff of the court — clerks, rapporteurs, the registry. Constitutional adjudication is the work of reading statutes against a written constitution and issuing reasoned decisions; it is labour, and almost the whole of it is labour. A constitution that cannot be enforced against the body it is meant to bind is a declaration, not a constraint. A constitution binds the legislature only when its rules are general, knowable, and prospectively binding on the rule-maker itself — otherwise the legislature is bound only by its own forbearance, which is no constraint at all.¹ The institution that makes the constraint justiciable is a precondition of the legal order the framework defends, not an optional expenditure within it. Personnel cost here is the irreducible core of that function.
• Transition mechanism: None. The line is retained. Keep does not preclude operating-efficiency review — a court of fifteen judges with a defined caseload has a measurable cost-per-decision, and parliamentary scrutiny of the registry’s staffing against case throughput is ordinary good governance. But efficiency review is not phase-out, and nothing in the framework warrants reducing the line.
• Affected groups: None displaced. Every citizen who brings, or could bring, a constitutional complaint relies on this function; so does every party whose contractual or property rights depend on the legislature being held to the constitutional text.

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

• Current allocation: 447.4 millió Ft
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: This is the employer-side payroll charge on the personnel line above — the szociális hozzájárulási adó (SzocHo) plus residual employer contributions levied on the court’s own wage bill. It is not a discretionary programme; it is a mechanical consequence of employing the staff. It rises and falls with the personnel line and the statutory payroll rate. There is a worth-noting curiosity in it, treated under Key Observations below: the state is here taxing its own court to fund its own treasury, and the 447.4 millió Ft is a transfer from one pocket of the central budget to another. That is an artefact of how Hungary accounts for public-sector employment, not a separately decidable policy. Classified Keep because the underlying personnel function is Keep; the charge cannot be cut independently of it.
• Transition mechanism: None. Moves with the personnel line.
• Affected groups: None.

Alkotmánybíróság — Dologi kiadások (Operating Costs)

• Current allocation: 628.1 millió Ft
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: The non-personnel running costs of the court — premises, utilities, IT systems, the case-management infrastructure, legal databases, publication of decisions, translation. A functioning constitutional court needs a courtroom, a registry that does not lose filings, and a means of publishing its reasoning so that the law it states is knowable. These are the operating substrate of the rights-protection function, not an expansion of it. The line is modest: at 628.1 millió Ft it is roughly a fifth of the personnel cost, the expected ratio for a body whose output is written reasoning rather than physical service delivery. Keep, with the standard caveat that procurement of IT and database contracts is open to ordinary value-for-money scrutiny.
• Transition mechanism: None.
• Affected groups: None.

Alkotmánybíróság — Ellátottak pénzbeli juttatásai (Cash Benefits to Beneficiaries)

• Current allocation: 148.8 millió Ft
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: This is the smallest line in the chapter and the one whose label is least self-explanatory. “Ellátottak pénzbeli juttatásai” — cash benefits to beneficiaries — appears on the operating budgets of many Hungarian state bodies and conventionally covers statutory payments owed to current or former office-holders and staff: in a court chapter, this is most consistently the pension supplement, severance, and analogous accrued entitlements payable to retired constitutional judges and to staff under the public-service employment rules. These are not a discretionary grant programme. They are accrued obligations — claims that vested through past service under the terms of employment in force at the time. Honouring a vested claim is the rule-of-law position the framework takes everywhere in this pipeline: pensioners are protected, accrued entitlements are paid, contracts run their course. The line is therefore Keep, not because the activity is a core function of the court, but because the obligation is owed and good-faith reliance protection requires it be met. A reform of the public-service pension architecture as a whole — addressed in the chapters that carry the pension system — would change how such entitlements are financed across the state; it would not strand the claim of a retired judge. At 148.8 millió Ft the line is in any case immaterial to the chapter total.
• Transition mechanism: None at the chapter level. Any change to the public-service entitlement structure belongs to the pension and public-employment chapters, applied with accrued-rights protection.
• Affected groups: Retired constitutional judges and former staff drawing the statutory entitlements. Classifying the line Keep protects them; no displacement.

Alkotmánybíróság — Beruházások (Capital Investment)

• Current allocation: 102.5 millió Ft
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: The capital line — equipment renewal, IT hardware, and building or fixture investment for the court. At 102.5 millió Ft it is the entire felhalmozási (capital) budget of the chapter and a small one: the recurring re-equipment cost of a single judicial institution. Capital maintenance of the premises and systems through which the court works is part of keeping the function operational, on the same footing as the operating line. It is not a discretionary investment programme with a contestable mix; it is replacement capital for an existing, retained function. Keep. If the line carried a specific multi-year construction or renovation commitment, the honest treatment would be to fetch the contract horizon and classify the remaining programme on its actual terms — but at this scale and with no sub-line detail in the chapter table indicating a discrete project, the line reads as routine recurring capital, and routine recurring capital for a Keep function is itself Keep.
• Transition mechanism: None.
• Affected groups: None.

Revenue Items

The chapter records no revenue. Both the operating and capital balance rows show 0.0 millió Ft of bevétel, and the chapter total confirms it: 4,326.9 millió Ft of expenditure, 0.0 millió Ft of revenue, a balance of −4,326.9 millió Ft. The European Union development budget row is likewise 0.0 across the board.

This is the correct design, and worth one sentence of analysis rather than none. A constitutional court should not be fee-financed. The voluntariness question from the analytical framework — could this function be financed by the people who use it, at a price reflecting demand — has a clear answer here, and the answer cuts toward full tax-financing. Charging a citizen a price to test whether a statute violates the constitution would ration constitutional protection by ability to pay and would let the legislature weaken the constraint on itself by setting the fee high enough to deter complaints. The function is a rights-protection institution whose value to any one citizen does not show up in that citizen’s willingness to pay, because the protection is against the coercive power of the state itself. Zero own-revenue is not a gap in this chapter; it is the chapter being designed correctly.

Chapter Summary

Classification	Count	Total (millió Ft)
Immediate Cut	0	0.0
Phase-Out	0	0.0
Nominal Freeze	0	0.0
Keep	5	4,326.9
Total	5	4,326.9

Revenue	Total (millió Ft)
Total chapter revenue	0.0

Key Observations

• The whole chapter is a Keep, and the framework says so without strain. The Constitutional Court is the institution through which a written constitution binds the legislature that wrote it. That is a constitutional precondition of the legal order the classical-liberal tradition defends — courts, contract enforcement, and an enforceable constraint on the rule-maker are the part of the state the framework affirms, not the part it phases out. Of the budget’s ninety-odd chapters this is among the cleanest Keeps, and it is useful for the whitepaper precisely as a reference point: the framework is not an argument against the state, it is an argument about which state functions are rights-protection and rule-of-law infrastructure and which are discretionary allocation. This chapter is the former.

• The risk in this chapter is institutional design, not the budget line — and the budget process cannot reach it. A constitutional court is only a constraint on the legislature if the legislature cannot, by ordinary majority, choose the people who staff it or narrow what it is allowed to review. Where appointment runs through the parliamentary majority and the mandate’s scope is itself set by amendable law, the institutional form leaves the strength of the constraint dependent on the forbearance of whichever bloc holds the majority. That is a structural observation about appointment and jurisdiction rules, not a claim about any line in this table — and it is the genuinely load-bearing point about the Hungarian Constitutional Court. But it is reached by constitutional and statutory reform of how judges are selected and what the court may hear, not by changing the 4,326.9 millió Ft. The budget keeps the function funded; whether the function is a real constraint is decided elsewhere. The analysis flags this so the whitepaper does not mistake a clean budget Keep for an all-clear on the institution.

• The 447.4 millió Ft employer-contribution line is the state taxing its own court. The szociális hozzájárulási adó and employer contributions on the court’s payroll are paid by the central budget to the central budget — money moved from the chapter’s pocket to the treasury’s pocket. It is real in the accounts and cannot be cut independently of the personnel line, but it is worth naming as an artefact of how public-sector employment is booked rather than a separately decidable cost. The same pattern recurs across every institutional chapter in the budget; this is simply the first place to note it.

• No own-revenue is correct, not a shortfall. As noted in the Revenue Items section, zero own-revenue is the framework’s correct design answer for this institution — the voluntariness test has a clear answer here, and that answer is full tax-financing.

Sources

Footnotes

1. Hayek, F. A. “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” American Economic Review, Vol. 35, No. 4, pp. 519–530. American Economic Association. 1945. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1809376 ↩