Article 7 of the Treaty on European Union – is it really a nuclear weapon?
The Treaty of Amsterdam (1998) made it possible for the European Union to impose legal (and not only political) sanctions on a Member State in case of violating the fundamental values of the Union. This practice, which initially connected legal consequences only to the serious and persistent violation of EU values, has been modified by the Treaty of Lisbon (2007) through adding the notion of ‘risking’ these values. Even though this Article has been part of the EU public law for two decades now, it only came to the centre of the Hungarian public attention in the last couple of years, mainly due to the continuous debates about the political turn of 2010 and about the new Hungarian constitution.