Liberals and Democrats (ALDE) in the European Parliament, along with Amnesty International, the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union, the Helsinki Committee and other international and national human rights organizations are drawing attention to the serious threats the new Hungarian constitution, due to be approved in the Hungarian Parliament on Monday 18th April, poses to widely held European values: freedom, democracy, equality, non-discrimination and respect for fundamental human rights.

According to the text, the Fundamental Law and the catalogue of human rights it contains is to be interpreted on the basis of specific values such as faith, loyalty, the prominence of the community and the nation before the individual, the primary role of traditional families in society and the importance of Christianity in preserving Hungarian nationhood.

Guy Verhofstadt, President of the Liberal and Democrat group in the European Parliament expressed his concern ahead of the constitution's approval: "We hold fundamental human rights to be absolute, and a wording that opens the possibility of their limitations is unacceptable for a member state that has signed up to the full body of EU law. It is in all our interests that this constitution does not become a Trojan horse for a more authoritarian political system in Hungary based on the perpetuation of one party rule."

"We call on the Hungarian authorities to submit the text of the new Constitution to the European Commission for evaluation and to revise any parts thereof that do not conform to EU values."

Specific details of the document which give rise to concern are: discrimination is not expressly prohibited on the grounds of sexual orientation, ethnicity, age and genetic features; the notions of marriage and family are defined to exclude single-parent families, cohabiting and same-sex couples; the protection of the life of the foetus from the time of conception is tantamount to a ban on abortion. The constitution also provides a list of duties that all citizens should fulfill in relation to each other (the adult offspring's duty to care for their ageing parents; the duty of workers and employers to cooperate with a view to community goals), which is unusual and lays the ground to perilously broad legal interpretations.

Furthermore, the powers of the Constitutional Court are seriously limited, the administrative autonomy of the judiciary is infringed, human rights bodies are abolished and merged, and regulations concerning the annual budget, the tax system and the pension system become extremely difficult to modify by later legislatures. The text also defines the Hungarian nation, including Hungarians living abroad, as the superior unit from which it sources its power, it could easily give way to irredentist acts that potentially harm the sovereignty of other countries and aggravate tensions between Central European states.

Finally, as also pointed out by the Council of Europe's Venice Commission, the whole process of drafting the Constitution has lacked transparency, flexibility, a spirit of compromise and sufficient time for debate. Surveys in Hungary suggest that a majority of the population considered that it should be subjected to a referendum.