The Codification of Socialist Criminal Law with Special Regard to Economic Crimes

In my study I am going to analyze the codification of criminal law in the socialist era in Hungary. In order to put the topic into context, I examined the political and historical circumstances which contributed to the legislative processes. Firstly, my research will address the question of how did the socialist ideology affect the traditional dogmatic system of substantive criminal law? Secondly I will analyze the erosion of the main principles of criminal law, for example the principle of nullum crimen sine lege/ nulla poena sine lege, and how the socialist legislation violated these principles. Thirdly, I focused on the development of economic crimes, examining the relationship of law and the socialist planned economy, as well as the codification technique of these crimes. Since the socialist era can be divided into several sub-periods, the trends in criminal legislation differ from one period to another, and therefore I basically undertook the detailed analysis of one sub-era, the Rákosi-dictatorship. As far as the sources are concered, I reviewed systematically the relevant criminal law literature and I analysed specific economic crimes through archival sources from the Section XXV of the Budapest City Archives. Also an important element of the research was the overview of the Diaries of the National Assembly from the Hungarian Parliamentary Collection, as it helped gain a deeper understanding of codification.