After The Judgment: The Implementation of Preliminary Rulings in the Hungarian Judicial System 2004–2019 And Beyond

The role played by preliminary rulings in EU legal integration and their impact on national legal systems can only be adequately understood if their implementation by national courts is scrutinized in detail. Based on a dataset collected over the past two years, this article examines the implementation of the preliminary rulings referred by Hungarian courts in the Hungarian judicial system in the period between EU accession and 2019 and somewhat beyond. Its principal aim, using the conceptual and analytical framework developed in previous scholarship, is to establish whether the so-called “implementation prejudice” observed in other national jurisdictions also characterizes national court implementation in Hungary. The article’s main finding is that in this first period of EU membership, despite the often rather hostile general climate for the application of EU legal obligations, the ECJ’s preliminary rulings have been implemented by Hungarian courts with only a handful of problematic cases arising in national judicial practice.