The fight against financing terrorism: New challenges and developments in Hungarian law

Abstract

The relevant Hungarian legal regime has been driven by the implementation of anti-terrorist sanctions brought by the United Nations Security Council (hereinafter: UNSC) and the European Council, the relevant domestic legislation has never been infl uenced by local experience. The relevant EC Regulations (e.g. 88 1/2002 and 2580/2001) are self-executing in Hungary (as in all EU member states). The relevant United Nations Security Council Resolutions (UNSC resolutions) 1267 and 1373 in relation to the freezing of non-banking/ fi nancial assets needs domestic implementation. The sanctions of the UN relevant bodies (qua non-self executing international rules) are formally only binding the states and not, so to say, the fi nancial institutions that will eventually freeze the accounts, it is obviously the state who is bound to simultaneously bear responsibility for keeping its international obligations and uphold internal rule of law.1 The pure administrative “black listing” procedure in Hungary is fully based on the blacklist of UNSC and the Council of the EU. The procedural and substantive standards currently applied in the international black listing procedure and its national implementation do not fulfi ll the minimum standards of the fundamental principles of human rights and the rule of law either. Hungary is facing the problem how to implement the various sanctions regimes whilst respecting their international obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights (hereinafter: ECHR) and the UN Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (hereinafter: UNCCPR) and how to implement procedural and substantive improvements aimed at safeguarding individual human rights and the rule of law, as a matter of credibility of the international fi ght against terrorism, in particular an appeal mechanism against sanctions imposed by United Nations and European Union bodies. It is important to defi ne the social context in which legal regime imposed by the UNSC, the EU and the Hungarian Government, aimed at freezing assets and fi nancial