Both laws failed to take into account the Constitution's strong defence of personal data and the right to privacy. Over the past fifteen years, the Constitutional Court has offered dozens of judgements explaining what these two important provisions actually mean. And that's without even looking at the 1993 law on data protection, which has had its own impact on the area.
Legislation on CCTV is very strict. It allows police to use CCTV pictures exclusively for criminal investigations. But the new legislation on CCTV cameras was reluctant to curb police powers in this way. The law, which was recently declared unconstitutional, ignored the fact that permanent observation was a violation of human dignity, and it made no reference to proportionality. Security guards would have been able to store recordings for thirty days, and even for sixty days in the case of postal or financial activities, even if no crime or infringement of the law was noticed at the time. But this is only one aspect of a law which would have given security guards more powers than the police in certain areas. Ferenc Mádl, the former president, only sent the passages relating to security cameras to the Constitutional Court for a ruling, and the Court did not go beyond this area. In theory, the constitutionality of this law has been examined several times, but it would seem that the Parliament's constitutional affairs and public order committees did not do their job properly.
The property law is just a drop in the ocean. Laws that effectively abolish privacy are passed every year. It's hard for an Interior Minister to say no to former police officers who have moved over into the private security industry. It's not easy to be tough with the private security sector, when they know that this could cost them the votes of the 100,000 people who are employed in the industry.

The author works for the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union.