Meeting at the Crossroads: A Comparative Study of the Hungarian and Finnish Legal Remedy System in Administrative Law
Meeting at the Crossroads: A Comparative Study of the Hungarian and Finnish Legal Remedy System in Administrative Law

Summary/Abstract: We can find mechanisms in every legal system for addressing the eventual breaches of law causedby the activities of public administration. The classical aspect of this issue is the creation of differentlegal remedy procedures against administrative decisions. Legal remedies can be divided into twomain types: internal remedies and the judicial review of administrative acts. Although the core purposeof these procedures is the same, they are not identical neither in their functions nor in their outcomes.Finding the right balance between them can be a difficult task and result in different answers. Todemonstrate this and outline some basic questions of the construction of a remedy system, the paperchose two prime examples of this divergence, Hungary and Finland. The regulations on the remedy systems of these two countries put different emphasis on the role of internal remedies and of judicialreview, as well as on the ex officio investigation powers of judges which is strongly connected to thisequilibrium. The two legislatures have followed different paths: in Hungary the internal remedies,which used to be available more widely have been gradually reduced, meanwhile in Finland internalremedies, which were initially exceptional, are becoming more and more widespread. Comparativelegal and dogmatic methods were used in the research, which led to the appropriate contextualisationof the legal instruments and allowed for conclusions regarding not only the two administrative remedysystems, but the basic elements of remedy systems in general as well as their interdependencies.

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