Budapest: A long-running quarrel over who may own and use Hungarian farmland has produced another judgment from the European Union’s top court, one that reaches beyond agriculture into the basic question of how a member state must treat property rights it has taken away. In a ruling handed down in mid-May, the Court of Justice held that European law forbids compensation calculated solely on the market value of land at the moment a usufruct right was deleted from the register.
The dispute traces back to a contentious Hungarian reform that cancelled usufruct rights, the legal entitlement to use and draw income from land owned by someone else, that had been registered largely in the names of non-nationals. When those rights were struck from the land register, holders lost access to plots they had farmed or relied upon, sometimes for years. Successive cases have reached the European court, which has repeatedly found the original cancellation incompatible with the free movement of capital and the protection of property.
The latest judgment turns to the aftermath, how to make affected holders whole. The court’s answer is that a compensation scheme pegged only to the market value of the land at the time the right was erased falls short of what European law requires. Such a calculation, the judges reasoned, fails to capture the full economic reality of what the holder lost, leaving a remedy that exists on paper but does not restore the value actually stripped away. A right unlawfully removed, in other words, cannot be settled with a narrow accounting that ignores the gains the holder would have continued to draw.
The significance lies in the principle as much as the facts. The court is signalling that when a state unwinds property entitlements in breach of European law, it cannot then design a compensation formula that quietly minimises the bill. Effective protection of fundamental rights, the reasoning runs, demands a remedy proportionate to the loss, not one engineered around the convenience of the public purse. That message carries weight well beyond the specific Hungarian programme, touching any national scheme that interferes with acquired economic rights.
For the holders who brought their grievances through years of national and European litigation, the decision is a further vindication, though not the end of the road. It now falls to Hungarian courts and authorities to translate the ruling into concrete payments, a step that has proven slow in earlier rounds of the saga. The pattern of European judgment followed by hesitant national implementation has become a familiar feature of the affair.
The case also lands amid a broader, tense conversation about the rule of law and the supremacy of European law in Hungary, where the government has at times resisted decisions emanating from Luxembourg. Each ruling that obliges the state to compensate those it disadvantaged adds to a body of case law testing whether national authorities will comply in full or in part.
For now, the legal direction is unambiguous. Property rights taken in violation of European law demand a remedy that reflects their true worth, and a market snapshot taken at the moment of deletion does not suffice. The harder question, as ever, is how quickly that principle reaches the people still waiting to be paid.
