ECHR to examine curtailing of Hungarian teachers' right to strike

The Strasbourg-based European Court of Human Rights is investigating the Hungarian government's decree which makes teachers' strikes invisible and the government will have to explain why it was necessary to impose such extreme restrictions on educators' right to organise and to go to court, the Hungarian Helsinki Committee said in a statement.

The Democratic Trade Union of Teachers (PDSZ) and the Teachers' Trade Union (PSZ) turned to the ECHR in September 2022 with the help of the Hungarian Helsinki Committee and the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union (TASZ), over the government's withdrawal of teachers' right to strike.

On 11 February 2022, citing the Covid pandemic, the government issued a decree making it mandatory for schools and kindergartens to guarantee childcare and to hold certain lessons even if teachers are on strike, effectively making a strike invisible.

According to the teachers, by making teaching mandatory during a strike, the right to strike has been unnecessarily and disproportionately curtailed, as a possible strike would cause at most a minimal disruption to the employer's operations, and the right to strike cannot fulfil its function of exerting pressure and resistance.

For this reason, the two unions, PSZ and PDSZ first appealed to the Hungarian Constitutional Court, but their action was dismissed on formal grounds.

However, the European Court of Human Rights accepted the joint complaint of the Hungarian teachers' unions. In their complaint, the unions argue that by making the strike invisible, the government itself had driven teachers towards civil disobedience. As a result, several teachers were fired.

According to the statement, "it is a new and encouraging development that the Strasbourg court has now communicated the complaint to the Hungarian state". This means that it has sent the unions' petition to the government for comment, requiring the state's representatives to justify to an independent international forum why the extreme restrictions on the teachers' right to organise and to go to court were necessary. The complainants can then submit their response, and the Strasbourg court will then make a decision about the Hungarian teachers' truncated right to strike.