The parliamentary house committee has validated the nomination of András Baka for president, backed by 140 MPs from the parliamentary group of the ruling Tisza Party, Aniko Haller Nagy, the deputy speaker performing the duties of the speaker of parliament, said after the committee's meeting on Monday.
The result of the secret ballot for the new president, scheduled to begin at 2pm on Tuesday, is expected to be announced at 3pm, she added.
András Baka was born on 11 December 1952 in Budapest. He obtained his Doctor of Laws degree from Eötvös Loránd University in 1978. Until 1990, he was a research fellow at the Institute of Political and Legal Sciences of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
During this time, he taught as a visiting professor at several universities in the United States and as a guest lecturer in Germany and France.
From 1990, as an independent, he served as a Member of Parliament for the MDF. He resigned from his seat in 1991 when he was elected a judge of the European Court of Human Rights. He served as the Hungarian judge on the Strasbourg-based court until 2008.
From 2008, he served as President of the Budapest Court of Appeal, and in 2009 the National Assembly elected him President of the Supreme Court for a six-year term, which ran until 2015. However, his term of office came to an end on 31 December 2011 with the establishment of the Curia of Hungary (Kúria), following a constitutional amendment by the Fidesz government.
As a result, András Baka appealed to the European Court of Human Rights, which ruled in his favour at first instance in 2014 and again on appeal in 2016. The judgment stated that the Hungarian authorities had violated his right to freedom of expression and that his human rights had also been infringed by the manner in which he was removed from his post prematurely.
András Baka is a researcher specialising in human rights and minority rights issues, and the author of numerous publications.
Parliament is electing a new president after Tamas Sulyok’s mandate ended at midnight on July 20 under the 17th amendment to the Fundamental Law. Agnes Forsthoffer, the speaker of parliament, has been exercising the rights and duties of the president in the interim.
