Chapter X: Igazságügyi Minisztérium (Ministry of Justice)

Overview

Chapter X funds the Igazságügyi Minisztérium (Ministry of Justice) and the appropriations it manages. The 2026 envelope is 39,821.0 millió Ft of expenditure against 150.0 millió Ft of own revenue — a chapter financed almost entirely by the general taxpayer, with a net call on the budget of 39,671.0 millió Ft.

The chapter is small relative to the spending ministries, and most of it divides cleanly along the analytical frame. Three components belong to the rights-protection core: the ministry’s own legislative-drafting administration, and two appropriations that honour the state’s liability when its own coercive apparatus inflicts harm — compensation for wrongful prosecution and pre-trial detention, and the fees of court-appointed defence counsel. These are not discretionary; they are what the state owes when it prosecutes, detains, and tries citizens, and a classical- liberal frame treats them as a precondition of legitimate criminal justice, not as a programme to be trimmed.

The remainder is where the chapter earns its analysis. The largest single line — 18,576.6 millió Ft for “justice modernisation” capital investment, nearly half the chapter — is an IT and infrastructure programme whose horizon is set by a multi-year EU-co-financed registry project. A 2,750.0 millió Ft transfer for animal-protection tasks sits inside a justice ministry for no reason the function itself supplies. A 726.9-millió-Ft comparative-law research institute does work that law faculties, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences network, and the ministry’s own drafting staff already do. And the chapter-managed programme grants — for “raising the standard of legal education” and for the judiciary’s “participation in legislative preparation” — are discretionary allocations whose recipients are chosen by the minister.

A note on the budget table’s structure: the ministry administration line carries a small “Egyéb felhalmozási célú kiadások” (other capital-purpose expenditure) entry of 10.0 millió Ft alongside its 10.1 millió Ft of investment; both are folded into the administration line item below. With that entry included, the chapter’s expenditure line items sum exactly to the budget document’s stated chapter total of 39,821.0 millió Ft.

Expenditure Analysis

Igazságügyi Minisztérium igazgatása (Ministry of Justice — Administration)

• Current allocation: 12,480.3 millió Ft (Personnel 6,458.1; Employer contributions and social-contribution tax 812.9; Operating costs 5,189.2; Investment 10.1; Other capital-purpose expenditure 10.0)
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: The Ministry of Justice’s core function is legislative drafting, codification, and the administration of the state’s rule-of-law machinery — the production and maintenance of the legal rules through which contracts are enforced and rights are adjudicated. This is a constitutional-precondition function in the classical-liberal frame: a market order requires enforceable, knowable law, and the drafting of that law is not something a voluntary subscription market produces at the scale a legal system needs. The line is kept. Keep does not mean exempt from scrutiny. The personnel allocation of 6,458.1 millió Ft funds a drafting and codification staff, and the operating allocation of 5,189.2 millió Ft is proportionally high relative to personnel for a ministry whose principal input is qualified legal staff — 80 Ft of operating cost for every 100 Ft of salary is a ratio worth interrogating in a drafting-and-codification body whose output is legal text. The chapter data does not break the operating line down further, so the composition cannot be classified from the budget tables alone; the recommendation is an operating-efficiency review of the dologi kiadások line, not a phase-out of the function. A ministry whose output is legal text and whose principal cost should be qualified legal staff is worth asking why its non-payroll operating cost runs this high.
• Transition mechanism: No transition. Subject the operating line to a zero-based review at the next budget cycle: justify each component of the 5,189.2 millió Ft against the drafting and codification mandate.
• Affected groups: None directly. The ministry’s legislative-drafting staff continue; the review affects procurement and operating contracts, not employment.

Mádl Ferenc Összehasonlító Jogi Intézet (Mádl Ferenc Institute of Comparative Law)

• Current allocation: 927.8 millió Ft (Personnel 726.9; Employer contributions and social-contribution tax 100.6; Operating costs 93.9; Investment 6.4)
• Classification: Phase-Out (2 years)
• Rationale: The MFI is a central government research body, created in 2019, that produces international comparative-law studies and recommendations to inform domestic legislation.¹ It was founded with a budget of 610 millió Ft for 2019, rising to a planned 850 millió Ft the following year² — the 2026 line of 927.8 millió Ft is the continuation of that trajectory. The question the frame puts to this line is not whether comparative legal research has value — it does — but whether it requires a dedicated, tax-financed state institute. Comparative-law research is already produced, in volume, by the law faculties of ELTE, the University of Szeged, the Pázmány Péter Catholic University, the legal research network of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (the HUN-REN Társadalomtudományi Kutatóközpont Jogtudományi Intézete), and the Ministry of Justice’s own drafting staff, whose statutory job is to ground Hungarian legislation in workable models. Standing up a separate institute does not add a capacity that was missing; it duplicates one that exists, and it relocates the research from competing academic institutions — where the standard is peer review and where a poor study is exposed by a rival’s better one — into a single body whose research priorities are set, and whose director is supervised, by the minister whose legislation the research is meant to inform. That is the structural weakness: comparative legal analysis commissioned and supervised by the office it advises has a built-in incentive to find that international experience supports the legislation already intended, and no rival institution inside the same structure to check it. Where research priority is genuinely contestable — which models to study, which jurisdictions to treat as comparators, which findings to publish first — a single state body cannot aggregate the dispersed judgement that a plural academic field expresses through competing publications; the institute substitutes one administrator’s priority list for that discovery process. The comparative-law function should be returned to the universities and the Academy network, where it competes, and to the ministry’s own drafting staff, who are already funded under the administration line above. The phase-out is short because the protected party is small and the skills are transferable.
• Transition mechanism: Phase-Out over 2 years via severance-with-overlap. The institute employs a research staff of qualified lawyers and comparative-law scholars — a group with directly marketable skills in academia, private legal practice, and the ministry’s own drafting function. The payroll component is the personnel allocation plus employer contributions: 726.9 + 100.6 = 827.5 millió Ft. Severance-with-overlap pays this payroll for 24 months while staff take university posts, private practice, or positions in the ministry’s drafting directorate, keeping both incomes during the overlap. The non-payroll components — operating costs of 93.9 millió Ft and investment of 6.4 millió Ft, together 100.3 millió Ft — end in the first budget cycle. Year-1 and Year-2 net saving is the non-payroll envelope of 100.3 millió Ft (the 827.5 millió Ft payroll is still being paid as severance). From Year 3 the full 927.8 millió Ft is saved annually. Existing research commissions in progress are completed and published before the institute closes; unpublished work is transferred to the relevant university or to the Academy’s Jogtudományi Intézet.
• Affected groups: The institute’s research staff — a small body of comparative-law scholars and qualified lawyers. The severance-with-overlap bridge gives 24 months of continued salary with the right to take new employment during the overlap; for a group with this skill profile, re-employment in academia, the ministry’s drafting directorate, or private practice is the realistic household path, and the transition bonus inverts the usual incentive to resist. No citizen’s life plan depends on the institute; its output is research that informs legislation, and that legislation continues to be drafted by the ministry.

IM felügyelete alá tartozó szervezetek és szakmai programok támogatása (Support for organisations and professional programmes under Ministry of Justice supervision)

• Current allocation: 169.0 millió Ft (capital-purpose)
• Classification: Phase-Out (2 years)
• Rationale: This is a chapter-managed appropriation for “supported organisations and professional programmes” under the ministry’s supervision. The budget line gives no breakdown of recipients or programme content — the appropriation is a discretionary grant pool whose allocation is decided by the minister. A grant pool with no named recipient and no statutory formula is the textbook structure of subjective allocation by a political officeholder: the benefit is concentrated on whichever organisations the ministry chooses to support, the cost is spread across all taxpayers, and the recipients acquire an institutional interest in the line’s continuation independent of the value of any particular grant. The function — to the extent the supported organisations do work that has value — does not depend on a discretionary ministry pool; bodies doing genuine professional work can be funded through transparent, formula-based or competitively-tendered channels, or by the members and users who value the work. The line is small, but the size of a line is not the criterion; the mechanism is.
• Transition mechanism: Phase-Out over 2 years, linear glide. Year 1 honours grant commitments already made to current recipients (the protected party is organisations that have planned activity around an expected grant) and disburses half the line; Year 2 winds the pool to zero. Organisations doing work with genuine professional value migrate to formula-based or competitive funding where such a channel exists, or to membership and user financing.
• Affected groups: The organisations currently receiving grants from the pool. The commitment-honouring window protects activity already planned against an expected disbursement.

A jogászképzés színvonalának emelését célzó programok támogatása (Support for programmes aimed at raising the standard of legal education)

• Current allocation: 332.2 millió Ft (capital-purpose)
• Classification: Immediate Cut
• Rationale: This appropriation funds “programmes aimed at raising the standard of legal education.” Legal education in Hungary is delivered by the law faculties of the universities — institutions that are already funded, that compete for students, and whose graduates’ bar-examination results and employment outcomes provide a direct quality signal. A separate ministry appropriation for “raising the standard” of that education is a discretionary transfer whose recipients and programme content the budget line does not specify; it sits outside the universities’ own budgets and outside any competitive or formula channel. There is no rights-protection function here and no constitutional precondition: the state’s legitimate interest in competent lawyers is met by the bar examination and by the courts and employers who hire law graduates, not by a discretionary grant line. No dependency chain ties any citizen’s life plan to this appropriation — the protected interest is that of whichever programmes or institutions the ministry currently funds, which is the rent, not a reliance the frame protects. The line is eliminated in a single budget cycle. Where a genuine quality problem exists in legal education, it is addressed at its source: by the bar examination’s standards and by the universities competing on the outcomes their graduates achieve.
• Transition mechanism: Eliminate in the 2026 budget cycle. The capital-purpose framing means no permanent personnel are attached to the line; the saving is the full 332.2 millió Ft.
• Affected groups: Whichever programmes or institutions currently receive funding from this appropriation. The full quality function of legal education continues through the universities and the bar examination.

Igazságszolgáltatási szervek részvétele a jogszabály-előkészítésben (Participation of judicial bodies in legislative preparation)

• Current allocation: 195.2 millió Ft (capital-purpose)
• Classification: Nominal Freeze
• Rationale: This appropriation funds the participation of judicial bodies — the courts, the prosecution service, and related institutions — in the preparation of legislation, by which the legislative drafter obtains the considered view of the bodies that will apply the law. The function has a defensible rationale: a legal rule drafted without the input of the institutions that adjudicate under it is more likely to be unworkable, and the consultation is a modest input into the rule-of-law machinery the chapter exists to fund. It is not, however, a line whose expansion is warranted — judicial participation in legislative consultation is a bounded, administrative activity, and the bodies concerned are themselves separately funded out of the courts’ and prosecution service’s own chapters. The line is held at its nominal level; real-terms erosion at typical inflation reduces its real share by roughly 20-25% over a decade without any active decision, which is the appropriate trajectory for a bounded administrative function inside a rule-of-law chapter.
• Transition mechanism: Hold the allocation at 195.2 millió Ft in nominal terms. No active reduction; real-terms erosion at ~2.5% inflation does the work.
• Affected groups: None. The courts and prosecution service continue to participate in legislative consultation; the activity is bounded and self-limiting.

Nemzetközi kötelezettségek teljesítése (Fulfilment of international obligations)

• Current allocation: 45.9 millió Ft (capital-purpose)
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: This appropriation funds the discharge of Hungary’s international obligations in the justice field — membership contributions and obligations arising from treaties and international legal-cooperation instruments. These are binding commitments the state has contracted, and the classical-liberal frame treats treaty obligations as binding while they bind: honouring a contracted international obligation is itself a rule-of-law function. The line is small and routine. It is kept.
• Transition mechanism: None.
• Affected groups: None.

A büntetőeljárásról szóló törvény alapján megállapított kártalanítás (Compensation determined under the Criminal Procedure Act)

• Current allocation: 150.0 millió Ft (capital-purpose)
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: This line funds compensation owed under the Criminal Procedure Act to persons wrongfully prosecuted or detained — citizens against whom the state deployed its coercive apparatus and later established that it should not have. This is the clearest case in the chapter of a rights-protection function: the state monopolises criminal prosecution and pre-trial detention, and when it inflicts that coercion on a person who turns out to be entitled to liberty, the compensation is not a discretionary transfer — it is the state’s liability for an involuntary harm it directly caused. To phase this out would be to leave a wrongfully detained citizen uncompensated for a deprivation of liberty the state imposed. The line is kept in full.
• Transition mechanism: None.
• Affected groups: Persons wrongfully prosecuted or detained, who retain their statutory claim to compensation.

Jogi segítségnyújtás (Legal aid)

• Current allocation: 365.7 millió Ft (capital-purpose)
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: Legal aid funds legal assistance for parties who cannot otherwise afford representation. The function sits at the boundary of the frame, and the honest classification turns on what the line actually protects. Where legal aid funds representation in criminal proceedings — defence against the state’s own prosecuting power — it is part of the rights-protection core: a criminal process in which one side commands the state’s prosecutorial resources and the other cannot afford counsel is not a rule-of-law process, and the equality of arms in criminal defence is a precondition of legitimate prosecution, not a welfare transfer. The line is kept. The classification carries one qualification the budget data cannot resolve: the appropriation does not separate criminal-defence legal aid from civil legal aid, and the case for tax-financing is strongest on the criminal side. An operating review should establish the split; the criminal-defence component is unambiguously Keep, and the line is kept whole pending that review rather than cut on an assumption the data does not support.
• Transition mechanism: None. Recommend an operating review to establish the criminal-versus-civil split for future budget cycles.
• Affected groups: Parties relying on legal aid, in particular criminal defendants who cannot afford counsel.

Bűncselekmények áldozatainak kárenyhítése (Compensation for victims of crime)

• Current allocation: 308.8 millió Ft (capital-purpose)
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: This line funds state compensation to victims of violent crime — typically where the offender cannot be identified or cannot pay. The function is a protective response to an involuntary harm: the victim of a violent crime did not consent to the harm, and where no solvent offender can be reached, the compensation is the state’s recognition that it holds the monopoly on the criminal-justice response and that the victim’s loss is otherwise unremedied. The line is small, bounded, and consistent with the frame’s treatment of protective responses to irreversible involuntary harm. It is kept.
• Transition mechanism: None.
• Affected groups: Victims of violent crime who retain their statutory claim to compensation.

Magán- és egyéb jogi személyek kártalanítása (Compensation of private and other legal persons)

• Current allocation: 2,544.5 millió Ft (capital-purpose)
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: This is the largest of the legal-compensation lines and funds compensation owed to private persons and other legal entities — the state’s liability where its own acts (regulatory measures, administrative decisions, expropriations, or other state action) inflict a loss on a private party that the law recognises as compensable. Honouring a recognised compensation liability is a property-rights and rule-of-law function: a state that could impose losses on private parties and then decline to pay the compensation the law establishes would itself be the source of the insecurity the rule of law exists to remove. The line is kept. As with the other compensation lines, Keep does not preclude scrutiny of the underlying state actions that generate the liability — a recurring compensation bill is also a signal about the volume and quality of the state decisions that produce the claims — but the compensation owed under established law is honoured.
• Transition mechanism: None.
• Affected groups: Private persons and legal entities holding recognised compensation claims against the state.

Az alapvető jogokat sértő elhelyezési körülmények miatti kártalanítás (Compensation for detention conditions that violate fundamental rights)

• Current allocation: 100.0 millió Ft (capital-purpose)
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: This line funds compensation to detainees held in conditions that violate their fundamental rights — overcrowding and similar conditions for which Hungarian courts have established a compensable claim. As with wrongful detention, this is the state’s liability for an involuntary harm inflicted by its own coercive apparatus: a person in state custody cannot exit the conditions, and the compensation is the recognised remedy for a rights violation the state directly caused. The line is kept. The compensation bill is, again, also a signal — a recurring appropriation for unlawful detention conditions points to a prison capacity and conditions problem upstream — but the compensation owed to the affected detainees is honoured in full.
• Transition mechanism: None.
• Affected groups: Detainees held in conditions found to violate fundamental rights, who retain their statutory compensation claim.

Kirendelt védői díjak kifizetése (Payment of court-appointed defence counsel fees)

• Current allocation: 725.0 millió Ft (capital-purpose)
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: This line pays the fees of court-appointed defence counsel — the lawyers assigned to represent criminal defendants who do not have, and in many cases must by law be provided with, their own representation. This is a rights-protection function at the centre of the frame. The state prosecutes; a criminal trial in which the defendant has no defence counsel is not a rule-of-law process, and the fee paid to assigned counsel is what makes the right to a defence operative rather than nominal. The line is kept in full. The fees paid to assigned counsel are a contractual obligation to the lawyers who perform the work, and they secure the equality of arms without which the state’s prosecuting power is unchecked.
• Transition mechanism: None.
• Affected groups: Criminal defendants entitled to assigned counsel, and the defence lawyers who perform the assigned work.

Az állatvédelemmel kapcsolatos feladatok támogatása (Support for animal-protection tasks)

• Current allocation: 2,750.0 millió Ft (operating)
• Classification: Phase-Out (3 years)
• Rationale: This appropriation funds “animal-protection tasks” — a 2,750.0 millió Ft transfer that sits inside the Ministry of Justice for no reason the function itself supplies. Animal protection is not a legislative-drafting activity, not a rule-of-law function, and not a response to involuntary harm inflicted on a rights-holding person; its presence in a justice chapter is an artefact of ministerial portfolio assignment, not of any analytical fit. The budget line gives no breakdown — it is a single transfer figure for “tasks,” with no named recipients, no programme specification, and no statutory formula. That structure is, again, subjective allocation by a political officeholder: the minister decides which animal-protection organisations and activities the 2,750.0 millió Ft supports, the cost is spread across all taxpayers, and the recipient organisations acquire a structural interest in the line’s continuation. The seen here is a recognisable and sympathetic cause — animal shelters, welfare organisations, the protection of animals from cruelty. The unseen is that this is 2,750.0 millió Ft taken from taxpayers by compulsion and allocated by one official’s discretion to a cause that has a large and demonstrated voluntary funding base: animal welfare is among the most successfully donation-financed activities anywhere, funded by membership, by bequests, by individual giving, and by volunteers, precisely because it commands genuine and widespread public sympathy. For a worker at the roughly 540,000 Ft median monthly gross wage³ (the 2024 annual median, per KSH Kereseti adatok; derived per-worker cost: 2,750.0 millió Ft across approximately 4.2 million personal income-tax filers), this single line absorbs on the order of 600-700 Ft a year in tax — a small sum per household, but the point is not the size: it is that a cause people will fund voluntarily, in volume, when asked is the weakest possible candidate for compulsory financing routed through ministerial discretion. The genuine rule-of-law element — the enforcement of animal-cruelty statutes — is a policing and prosecution function already funded in the police and prosecution chapters, and is unaffected by this line. What this appropriation funds is the grant-making, and that should be returned to the voluntary sector that already does it well. The horizon is three years rather than immediate because current recipient organisations — shelters in particular — have planned operations, including the care of animals already in their charge, around an expected continuation of the grant, and an abrupt cut would strand that planning.
• Transition mechanism: Phase-Out over 3 years, linear glide. The protected party is the recipient organisations — animal shelters and welfare bodies that have planned current operations around the grant. Year 1 disburses two-thirds of the line and signals the wind-down, giving organisations a full cycle to expand their voluntary fundraising; Year 2 disburses one-third; Year 3 the line is zero. The glide gives shelters time to build the donor base that comparable organisations sustain elsewhere, and it does not interrupt the care of animals already in charge. Net saving is 916.7 millió Ft in Year 1, 1,833.3 millió Ft in Year 2, and the full 2,750.0 millió Ft from Year 3.
• Affected groups: Animal-protection and animal-welfare organisations currently funded by the appropriation, principally shelters. The three-year glide gives them time to replace ministry grant income with the voluntary funding — membership, donation, bequest, corporate sponsorship — that sustains this sector in practice. Animals currently in the care of funded shelters are protected by the glide, which does not interrupt operations.

A jogi személyek egységes nyilvántartásával kapcsolatos feladatok támogatása (Support for tasks related to the unified register of legal persons)

• Current allocation: 150.0 millió Ft (operating)
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: This line supports the operational tasks associated with the Jogi személyek egységes nyilvántartása (JSZENY — the unified register of legal persons), the new central register of companies and other legal entities being built under the Ministry of Justice. A public register of legal persons — the authoritative record of who is incorporated, who may bind a legal entity, who is liable — is a rule-of-law and contract-enforcement function: parties cannot contract safely without a reliable way to verify the legal existence and representation of their counterparty, and a register is the institutional form that verification takes. The register itself belongs in the Keep category on that ground. The 150.0 millió Ft here is the operating sliver of a much larger programme: the build of the unified register is a 10,000 millió Ft project co-financed under the EU’s DIMOP_PLUSZ operational programme, with a project completion date of 31 December 2027.⁴ That capital build is the “igazságügyi modernizáció” line treated below; this 150.0 millió Ft is the recurring operational support for the register function and is kept. Keep does not preclude an operating-efficiency review once the register is live and steady-state running costs are known.
• Transition mechanism: None. Review the recurring operating cost once the register reaches steady-state operation post-2027.
• Affected groups: None. Users of the register — every party that needs to verify the legal existence or representation of a counterparty — rely on the function.

Az igazságügyi modernizációval összefüggő intézkedések (Measures related to justice modernisation)

• Current allocation: 18,576.6 millió Ft (capital-purpose)
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: This single line is 18,576.6 millió Ft — 47% of the entire chapter — and funds capital investment in “justice modernisation”: the IT systems and infrastructure that digitise the courts, the registers, and the ministry’s own processes. The largest identified component is the build of the unified register of legal persons (JSZENY), a project with a 10,000 millió Ft envelope co-financed under the EU’s DIMOP_PLUSZ operational programme and a completion date of 31 December 2027.⁴ The classification turns on what the spending builds. A modern, reliable, digital register of companies and legal persons, and digitised court processes, are rule-of-law infrastructure: they lower the cost and raise the reliability of contract enforcement, of verifying a counterparty, and of resolving disputes — the institutional plumbing through which a market order actually operates. Building that infrastructure is a legitimate state function in the frame, and the line is classified Keep. The classification carries two qualifications that the budget data flags but cannot resolve. First, this is a capital-investment line, not a recurring entitlement: it funds a finite build that completes — the JSZENY project on a 2027 horizon — and a Keep classification of the 2026 capital tranche is not a commitment to 18,576.6 millió Ft of capital investment in perpetuity. Once the register and the associated systems are delivered, the line should fall to the recurring operations-and-maintenance cost, which is a far smaller figure, and the budget should show that decline rather than rolling the capital envelope forward. Second, a capital line of this size, on a public IT-procurement programme, is exactly the kind of spending where procurement discipline matters most: the case for the function does not extend to the procurement process that delivers it, and the chapter data gives no visibility into how the contracts are let. The recommendation is Keep on the function, with the firm qualification that the line is monitored as a finite capital build that declines to maintenance cost post-2027, and that the procurement is subject to competitive-tender scrutiny.
• Transition mechanism: None on the function. Track the line as a capital build: it should decline to recurring operations-and- maintenance cost once the JSZENY project and associated systems complete around 2027, and the budget should reflect that decline rather than rolling the capital envelope forward.
• Affected groups: None adversely. The users of the digitised registers and court systems — every party that contracts, litigates, or verifies a counterparty — benefit from the infrastructure.

Revenue Items

The chapter records 150.0 millió Ft of own revenue, in the operating budget, against 39,821.0 millió Ft of expenditure. No felhalmozási (capital) revenue and no EU development revenue is recorded.

• Name: Hazai működési bevétel (Domestic operating revenue)
• Current yield: 150.0 millió Ft
• Type: Fee / Charge
• Notes: The chapter does not itemise this revenue further. For a justice ministry it is the ordinary administrative income of the ministry and its supervised bodies — procedural and administrative fees, charges for services, and similar minor receipts. It is not a tax. The amount is immaterial against the chapter’s expenditure: own revenue covers 0.4% of the chapter’s spending, and the chapter is financed almost entirely from general taxation. The expenditure reclassifications proposed above do not turn on this revenue line and would not materially change it; the small fee income attaches to the ministry’s ongoing administrative function, which is kept.

This chapter contains no major tax revenue items. The central government’s tax revenue structure (SZJA, ÁFA, corporate tax, excise) sits in Chapter XLII, not here.

Chapter Summary

Classification	Count	Total (millió Ft)
Immediate Cut	1	332.2
Phase-Out	3	3,846.8
Nominal Freeze	1	195.2
Keep	10	35,446.8
Total	15	39,821.0

Revenue	Total (millió Ft)
Total chapter revenue	150.0

Year-1 net saving across all reclassified lines: 332.2 (Immediate Cut) + 100.3 (Mádl institute, non-payroll) + 84.5 (organisations/programmes support, Year 1 net of linear glide) + 916.7 (animal protection, Year 1) = approximately 1,433.7 millió Ft. Steady-state saving from Year 3 onward, once the phase-outs complete: 332.2 + 927.8 + 169.0 + 2,750.0 = 4,179.0 millió Ft annually, against a chapter envelope of 39,821.0 millió Ft. The chapter is roughly 89% rights-protection and rule-of-law infrastructure that the frame keeps; the reform is at the margin, not in the core.

Key Observations

• The chapter divides cleanly into a rights-protection core and a discretionary margin. Roughly 89% of the envelope — the ministry’s legislative-drafting administration, six legal-compensation lines, the court-appointed-counsel fees, the international-obligations line, the register operating support, and the justice-modernisation capital build — is rule-of-law infrastructure and the state’s liability for harms its own coercive apparatus inflicts. None of that is a discretionary transfer; the frame keeps it. The reform is in the remaining 11%.

• The compensation lines are a Keep cluster — but the recurring bill is a signal worth reading. Six lines, together 4,194.0 millió Ft, pay what the state owes when it prosecutes, detains, expropriates, or regulates and inflicts a compensable loss. Honouring those liabilities is a property-rights function and is not negotiable. But a recurring appropriation for unlawful detention conditions, for wrongful prosecution, and for losses inflicted on private legal persons is also a standing measurement of how often the state’s own apparatus produces compensable harm. The compensation is kept; the upstream volume of state decisions that generate the claims is the thing to watch.

• Portfolio assignment, not function, explains the animal-protection line. A 2,750.0 millió Ft transfer for “animal-protection tasks” sits in a justice ministry because of how the ministerial portfolio was drawn, not because animal protection is a justice function. It is a discretionary grant pool — no named recipients, no formula — funding a cause with one of the strongest voluntary funding bases of any charitable activity. A cause people demonstrably will fund when asked is the weakest candidate for compulsory financing through ministerial discretion; the three-year glide returns the grant-making to the voluntary sector that already sustains it, while the genuine enforcement function — animal-cruelty statutes — continues, unaffected, in the police and prosecution chapters.

• A dedicated state comparative-law institute duplicates a function the universities and the Academy network already perform — and relocates it inside the office it advises. The Mádl Ferenc Institute produces comparative-law research to inform legislation. That research is already produced, under peer review and competitive pressure, by law faculties and the Academy’s legal research network, and by the ministry’s own drafting staff. Standing up a separate institute does not add a missing capacity; it duplicates an existing one and moves it from competing academic institutions into a body whose director the minister supervises and whose research informs that same minister’s legislation. The structural weakness is the absent rival check, not the cost.

• The largest line is a finite capital build, not a recurring entitlement — and the budget should show it declining. The 18,576.6 millió Ft justice-modernisation line, 47% of the chapter, funds IT and infrastructure including the EU-co-financed JSZENY register on a 2027 completion horizon. The function — digital rule-of-law infrastructure — is kept. But a Keep on the 2026 capital tranche is not a Keep on 18,576.6 millió Ft of capital spending in perpetuity. Once the build completes, the line should fall to recurring operations-and- maintenance cost. A capital envelope rolled forward year on year after the project it funded has been delivered is how a finite build quietly becomes a permanent line; the budget should be made to show the decline.

• Two discretionary education and programme grants total 501.2 millió Ft and address quality problems that have a source elsewhere. The legal-education-quality grant (332.2 millió Ft, Immediate Cut) and the supported-organisations programme pool (169.0 millió Ft, Phase-Out) are discretionary allocations whose recipients the budget line does not name. Where legal education has a genuine quality problem, it is addressed by the bar examination and by universities competing on graduate outcomes — not by a ministry grant line outside any competitive or formula channel.

Sources

Footnotes

1. 95/2019. (IV. 25.) Korm. rendelet a Mádl Ferenc Összehasonlító Jogi Intézet létrehozásáról. Nemzeti Jogszabálytár / Hatályos Jogszabályok Gyűjteménye. 2019. https://net.jogtar.hu/jogszabaly?docid=a1900095.kor. The institute is a central government research body under the direction of the Minister of Justice, conducting international comparative-law research and producing recommendations for domestic legislation. ↩

2. “Százmillókból fog működni a Mádl Ferencről elnevezett jogi kutatóintézet.” Index.hu. 2019. https://index.hu/belfold/2019/04/25/evi_850_millio_forintbol_fog_mukodni_a_madl_ferencrol_elnevezett_jogi_kutatointezet/. “Az intézet idén különböző címeken 610 millió forintot kap, a következő évben pedig már 850 millió forintból fog működni.” ↩

3. KSH (Központi Statisztikai Hivatal). “Keresetek, 2024. évi adatok.” https://www.ksh.hu/keresetek. 2025. Annual median gross monthly wage for 2024: approximately 520,376 Ft; December 2024 median: 560,900 Ft. The chapter’s 540,000 Ft figure is a mid-year approximation within this range. The per-worker cost of 600-700 Ft is derived by dividing 2,750.0 millió Ft by approximately 4.2 million personal income-tax filers (KSH SZJA data). ↩

4. “Jogi személyek egységes nyilvántartása — DIMOP_PLUSZ-1.3.6-23-2023-00001.” NISZ Nemzeti Infokommunikációs Szolgáltató Zrt. https://nisz.hu/projektjeink/jogi-szemelyek-egyseges-nyilvantartasa-d150. Contracted project value “10 000 000 000 Ft”; planned completion date “2027.12.31.” The project, under the direction of the Ministry of Justice, builds the unified register of legal persons (JSZENY). ↩ ↩²