State of emergency and Human Rights – the situation of Hungary

Abstract

In the first days of 2020, the nations of Europe could hardly imagine that their lives were going to change so drastically in a couple of months. SARS – Covid 19, aka coronavirus resulted in a great change in all societies on the globe. Most countries introduced a state of emergency and made restrictions on many aspects of people’s lives. The present paper intends to give an overview of the measures that the Hungarian government has taken so far. For this purpose, it first analyses the legal background of state of emergency that would help understand the present situation. Secondly, it describes the measures taken, and finally it evaluates how the measures affect human rights, especially free movement, freedom of enterprise and free speech.