BackThe Judiciary Committee supported, with ten yes votes and two abstentions, that the National Assembly put the report on the activities of the Commissioner for Fundamental Rights in 2016 on the agenda of its plenary meeting.
In his introduction, by way of an addition to the report, Ombudsman László Székely mentioned, among others, that in 2016, as many as 8,396 petitions were submitted to his Office, which was in harmony with the average number of complaints filed in the previous years and also, in line with the number of complaints filed to the commissioners of the Visegrád Four countries, in proportion to the population of these countries. Out of the complaints, 2,426 cases had to be investigated into. The inquiry reports of the Commissioner for Fundamental Rights contained a total of 540 recommendations, of which a mere 41 were not accepted by the authorities and institutions that were addressed but, the majority of rejections were explained by budgetary reasons.
The Commissioner of Fundamental Rights said in summary that the need for fine tuning the rule of law is demonstrated by the citizens by turning to the Ombudsman, as is shown by practical experience.
The members of the Judiciary Committee were partly interested in or commented on, mostly in a highly positive tone, specific inquiries, and partly the activities pursued by László Székely and his two deputies. In addition to expressing the general acknowledgement of the work of the Ombudsman, a Member of Parliament made a comment in which he called the work of the National Preventive Mechanism operating in the Office of the Commissioner, which was established in order to fight torture and other inhuman and degrading activities, a spectacular achievement.
At the hearing, the recurring difficulties in the cooperation between the local governments and the national minority self-governments of the settlements were brought up, in addition to the criticism of the legal regulation of the task-based support of the national minority self-governments.
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Source: Office of the Commissioner for Fundamental Rights, Hungary
