The Main Questions of Hungarian International Civil Producer Law after the Codification

The law-decree Nn. 13/1979 on private international law came inte force on July 1st, 1979. By this event Hungarian private international law became codified law. Our earlier private international law - with respect to the inner source of law - had been built up mostly on doctrines of customary law, whereas the codification did not touch upon the other great group of the sources of private international law, i. e. the international conventions. Rules of international civil procedure had also been contained by written sources of law besides doctrines of customary law. An excellent attempt had already been made at the codification of Hungarian private international law earlier, by István Szászy1 in 1947. This draft dealt with the more important general questions of private international law as well, as with the definition of the conflicts rules and it was furnished with detailed comments, too. „It was a draft made with excellent scientific erudition on grand theoretical bases”. The situation in the inner - and mostly - in the foreign politics at that time was not advantageous for the codification of private international law. Its objective necessity emerged only in the mid-sixties and later - after the economic reform and with the formation of international relations of new types - at the turn of the sixties and the seventies. Hungary - a country with an extraordinarily open economy where 50% -of the GNP is realized in foreign trade and with an increasing role in international tourism - badly needed the code of private international law. The preparatory works of the code started in the sixties, the final draft was proposed in 1978 and became law-decree Nr. 13/1979 (further on: PIL). The PIL regulates the basic problems of private international law and international civil procedure. It can thus be regarded as a code also in this respect. The code consists of eleven chapters, three of which deal with international civil procedure. The codification also revived - among others, by its structure - an old debate carried on in foreign legal literature (but less disputed by Hungarian scholars) whether international civil procedure was a self-standing branch of law or only a part of private international law. The positive rules in force differ in some respects from the earlier regulation. The elaboration and theoretical explantion of this seems to be a task of the future. The recently deceased Professor István Szászy was the most known and appreciated scholar of Hungarian private international law and the only scholar - beside Professor Géza Magyary who lived earlier - dealing with international civil procedure law. His more importand works in English are Private International Law in Socialist Countries (Recueil des Cours ni, 1964), Private International Law in the Wèstern, Socialist and Developing Countries (Leiden, 1974), International Civil Procedure (Leiden, 1967).