HUNGARY Law and Practice Contributed by: István Varga and Viktor Előd Cserép, PROVARIS Varga & Partners
9. Damages and Judgment 9.1 Awards Available to the Successful Litigant Types of Relief In Hungarian civil procedure law, three types of actions are generally recognised, which may result in three types of awards: • judgments ordering performance (monetary or specific performance, enjoining judgments); • declaratory judgments; and • judgments creating or terminating rights or a legal status. Means of Recourse The ordinary means of recourse available against first instance decisions is the appeal, which can be brought within 15 days of service of the deci- sion (see 10. Appeal ). Final and binding decisions (first instance deci- sions that were not appealed within the relevant deadline as well as second instance decisions) are subject to two types of extraordinary means of recourse: revision and retrial. The revision of final and binding decisions by the Kúria may be requested in the case of legal errors and derogations from precedents previ- ously issued by the Kúria . The retrial of the case may be requested from the court of first instance in cases of: • subsequent discovery of facts or evidence which the party making recourse could not discover and rely on in the main proceedings, with no fault on its part, and which could have resulted in a different decision; • subsequent discovery of another res judicata decision (on a preliminary issue);
• a subsequent decision of a criminal court in view of which the contested decision turns out to have been influenced by a criminal offence; • the judgment was obtained after service by publication rules had been breached; • the judgment is based on a breach of the European Convention of Human Rights, and this is established in an ECHR decision; or • the judgment is based on a breach of the Fundamental Law, and this is established by a Constitutional Court decision. A further, newly introduced extraordinary means of recourse against decisions of the Kúria is the so-called uniformity complaint, which may be filed with the Kúria against decisions that devi- ate from published decisions of the Kúria (see 10.1 Levels of Appeal or Review to a Litigation ). 9.2 Rules Regarding Damages Punitive damages are generally not available in Hungarian civil law, but traces of a punitive func- tion can be detected in some decisions. Mone- tary compensation may be awarded for violation of personality rights, and damages may entail some punitive function in the fields of IP, com- petition, and data protection law, for example. There are no specific rules limiting the maximum amount of damages. However, only damages that are caused by a breach of contract or a legal provision may be compensated. Consequential damages to the assets of the aggrieved party and lost profit may be compensated for only to the extent the aggrieved party proves that such damages were foreseeable at the time of the conclusion of the contract as possible conse- quences of a breach of contract. In the case of an intentional breach of contract, the damages shall be compensated for in full.
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