Exercise of constitutional review. After accession,259 the HCC as a bench initially tended to evade any confrontation on the point: in Dec. 17/2004 (V.25) AB, it avoided any attempt at goading it into constitutional review of a Regulation.260 Nevertheless it would appear that it remained mindful of the remaining constitutional jurisdiction it had, in line with its Dec. 4/1997 (I.22) AB and expressly voiced by Xxxxxx, X. (Xxxx, J., concurring) in Dec. 1053/E/2005 AB. He noted, in that case, the serious constitutional and European law debates of previous decades261 as to “whether constitutional courts … could exercise their constitutional protectionist function.” Through a “significant metamorphosis of European law,” based partly on the relationship of co-operation between the ECJ and national courts, Xxxxxx, J. stated:262 Following all this, the European constitutional courts adopted a very similar approach, and out of them the practice of the German constitutional court and the French constitutional council are the most referred to. As regards the present request, we might come to the same conclusion by using another path already followed by many other European constitutional courts. This means that the very narrow scope of application – in which the theoretical possibility of a constitutional court decision regarding European law matters exists – is determined theoretically and in the spirit of self-restraint. It was apparent then that the HCC retained a limited but vital jurisdiction – which in practice it would almost always refuse to exercise – that continued to protect the essential core of Hungarian sovereignty and put the power to decide upon the rate of integration into its hands. This is in fact what occurred: in Dec. 57/2004 (XII.14) AB263 and Dec. 58/2004 (XII.14) AB,264 the HCC regarded the 2004 EU Constitutional Treaty as an international treaty which was subject to its a priori (pre-ratification) review. Similarly in Dec. 61/2008 (IV.29) AB,265 the HCC also regarded the 2007 Lisbon Treaty as an international treaty before ratification by Hungary. It xxxxxx000 that “as long as the required conditions included in the treaty – which are needed to enter into force – are not fulfilled, the Constitutional Court can only appraise the founding and amending [EU] treaties as sources of international law.”
