Why does a minister fund the institute that advises his own legislation?

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 year[^2] — 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.