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Baka, the candidate of the governing Tisza Party, was elected in a secret ballot with 140 votes in favor and six against. He will assume office on the eighth day following the announcement of the election result.
Parliament elected a new president after the mandate of former President Tamás Sulyok ended on July 20 following the 17th amendment to the Fundamental Law. Ágnes Forsthoffer, speaker of parliament, has exercised presidential powers in the interim.
Addressing lawmakers after the vote, Baka framed his election as coming at the beginning of a new political era and said Hungary could not avoid confronting its recent past.
He said the country needed to understand “how the nation reached this point,” arguing that Hungary had “wasted a generation’s worth of time, slipping from a model student during the time of the democratic transition to the ranks of lagging nations.”
Born in Budapest on Dec. 11, 1952, Baka completed secondary school in 1971 and began studying at the Faculty of Political Science and Law at ELTE in 1973. He obtained his doctorate in law in 1978.
From 1978 until 1990, he worked as a research fellow at the Institute of Political Science and Law of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Between 1990 and 1998, he served as director-general of the College of Public Administration.
From the 1980s onward, Baka also taught as a visiting professor at several universities in the United States and was repeatedly invited to lecture in France and Germany.
His academic work has focused particularly on human rights and minority rights. He has held the title of Candidate of Political Science and Law since 1988, when he also received the Hungarian Academy of Sciences’ Academic Youth Prize for his scholarly achievements.
Baka briefly entered parliamentary politics following Hungary’s democratic transition. He served as an independent MP for the Hungarian Democratic Forum between 1990 and 1991, during the first parliamentary term after the change of regime.
During his time in parliament, he served as secretary of the Committee on Human Rights, Minorities and Religious Affairs and headed the MDF parliamentary group’s human rights working group.
He resigned his parliamentary mandate in 1991 after being elected a judge of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. He remained Hungary’s judge at the ECHR until 2008.
After returning to Hungary, Baka served as president of the Budapest Court of Appeal between 2008 and 2009.
Parliament elected him president of the Supreme Court in June 2009 for a six-year term. Alongside that role, he served as president of the National Council of the Judiciary, then responsible for the central administration of Hungary’s courts.
His term ended on Dec. 31, 2011, under the transitional provisions of the Fundamental Law that entered into force on Jan. 1, 2012.
The Supreme Court was subsequently succeeded by the Kúria, while the positions of head of the Kúria and head of the judicial administration were separated.
Baka had criticized the judicial reforms and was prevented from standing for the presidency of the Kúria under new legislation requiring candidates to have five years of judicial experience in Hungary.
Because legislation with constitutional force prevented him from seeking judicial redress domestically, Baka turned to the European Court of Human Rights.
The ECHR ruled against Hungary in May 2014, with the decision upheld on appeal in June 2016. The court found that Baka’s right to freedom of expression had been violated and that the manner in which his term as chief justice had been prematurely ended also amounted to a violation of his rights.
Following his removal as head of the Supreme Court, Baka continued his judicial career as a presiding judge at the Kúria.
His election as president now brings him back to one of Hungary’s highest constitutional offices more than three decades after his brief period as a member of parliament and following a career spent largely in the judiciary, human rights law and public administration.
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