European Union

Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you had three or four different mobile phone chargers at home and still couldn't charge your new smartphone with any of them? Only one year from now, you can finally say goodbye to such problems, as another segment of the European Union's internal market is being harmonized: by 2024, a common charger for mobile devices and other electronic devices will finally be introduced. Read more... (Roxána Bereczki)

Nowadays the people can easily fulfil their wishes via various online platforms, websites in just a few seconds. However, in the midst of fulfilling said desires, the average consumer can easily become a victim of a scam; a topic we have already discussed in a previous article on practices commonly referred to as “dark patterns". Therefore, it is worth asking what kind of behavior should be expected from consumers in order to be able to say that they have done everything expected, and can we talk about consumer groups that need to be protected in particular? Read more... (Dominik Boros)

This blog post tries to demonstrate why the European Union (henceforth abbreviated as the EU or the Union) considers enlargement policy as a key domain these days – whether it considers it as a foreign policy or geopolitical instrument, and how this relates to Ukraine and Moldova’s candidate status. Read more... (Petra Olesnyovics)

The European Union has been linked to the energy sector from the beginning. However, it is worth noting that this area is still a shared competence in the integration. The European Union has many challenges in the field of energy policy, such as increasing import dependence, limited diversification, increased energy demand, climate change, the lack of renewable energy sources, and shortcomings in the integration of energy markets. Among these, energy dependence is largely determined by the evolution of energy consumption. Therefore, it is important to examine the relationship between energy production and consumption between 2010 and 2020 in the European Union. Read more.. (Sebestyén Márk Pella)

On 5 May 2022, the European Parliament called for the Council and the Commission to take more action to address the deterioration of EU values in Hungary and Poland in a resolution adopted with 426 votes to 133 and 37 abstentions. Despite the deteriorating situation in both countries in recent years, member states have thus far avoided voting to determine whether there is “a clear risk of a serious breach” of the EU’s common values. Read more... (Daniel Szilágyi)

In a series of judgments adopted 17 May 2022, the Court of Justice of the European Union (Court) further developed its interpretation of the provisions of Directive 93/13/EEC on unfair terms in consumer contracts, particularly with regard to those national procedural principles which might impede the effective exercise of the rights that individuals – specifically, consumers – derive from EU law. Read more... (Daniel Szilágyi)

On May 19, 2022, the European Commission decided to initiate an infringement procedure against Hungary, alleging that the given Member State failed to “correctly transpose” Directive (EU) 2017/1371, providing the European Union (‘EU’) rules on the fight against fraud to the Union’s financial interests by means of criminal law, also known as the PIF Directive. Besides Hungary, Estonia, Malta, and the Netherlands also landed in hot water over this issue, upon receiving letters of formal notice assigned with identical reasons, marking the commencement of infringement procedures. Read more... (Petra Ágnes Kanyuk)

From 1 January 2021, a new EU own resource, a contribution based on non-recycled plastic packaging waste was introduced in the European Union's budget for 2021-2027 as a new source of revenue. The European Union would like to encourage the Member States to reduce packaging waste and, through the implementation of the European Plastics Strategy, to help Europe move towards a circular economy that minimizes the waste and the leakage of resources, emissions, and energy. The question may be how this change will affect the operation of the Union and how it will work in practice. Read more... (Szófia Németh-Kiss)

With Hungary’s accession to the European Union, the national and European budgets got into considerably closer contact with each other. On the other hand, we should also see and note that after the accession, the practice of budget fraud related to acquisitions within the EU has evolved. These crimes included various VAT-related frauds such as accepting pro forma invoices related to domestic sales activities and other economic activities related to acquisitions and sales within the Community. In the second part of our series on budget fraud in Hungary, we focus on the effective Hungarian regulation. Read more... (Petra Ágnes Kanyuk)

The protection of the European Union’s financial interests holds a prominent place within the EU’s institutional framework, as is historically evident from the inclusion in EU primary law of the requirement that Member States ensure their effective protection, equivalent to that reserved for their national counterparts. As regards the Hungarian regulation, on the road leading to the establishment of the legal definition of budget fraud currently in force in the new Criminal Code, the effective protection of the budget of the EU or EC as a need was the most pronounced among the factors which brought about the formulation. In the following, we aim to summarise the outline of the development of budget fraud in Hungary in two parts. Read more... (Petra Ágnes Kanyuk)