Constitutional Court

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.