András Baka is an internationally recognised legal scholar, who began his career at the Institute for Legal Studies of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, then became director general of the College of Public Administration. The peak of his international judicial career came when he served for two terms, between 1991 and 2008, as a judge at the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in Strasbourg. On his return home, in 2009, parliament elected him president of the Supreme Court. The second Orbán government, which came to power in 2010 with a constitution-making majority, removed him by renaming the Supreme Court as the Curia, thereby formally creating a new institution and appointing a new head to lead it.
Baka subsequently won a case against the Hungarian state at the European Court of Human Rights, which found that his rights to a fair trial and to freedom of expression had been violated. He has been a regular voice on rule-of-law issues in Hungary and abroad. He is an independent-minded, somewhat old-school lawyer, and Hungary has had several presidents of this type. His ability to embody national unity may be complicated by the fact that he has been an outspoken critic of the Orbán system both at home and internationally.
