The Faculty of Law of the University of Debrecen hosted the National Criminal Law Pleading Competition on Wednesday. Sixteen of the best law students from Hungary’s eight law schools competed as prosecutors and defence attorneys, testing their knowledge of criminal law and criminal procedure, as well as their rhetorical skills. The competition is organized each year by a different law faculty.
Two contestants from each of the eight Hungarian higher education institutions offering legal studies participated in the event. Students received the case study on-site and had 90 minutes to prepare. During this time, they were allowed to use printed versions of the Criminal Code, the Code of Criminal Procedure, and two relevant uniformity decisions of the courts.
The task involved not only solving the legal case and providing the correct legal classification, but also preparing a pleading of up to ten minutes, which had to be presented before a professional jury in a setting designed to simulate a courtroom.
According to the fictional case, the defendant was a mother who parked her car while visiting relatives, leaving it in reverse gear with the handbrake not fully engaged. While saying goodbye, she handed the ignition key to her three-and-a-half-year-old child and asked the child to unlock the vehicle and place the key in the ignition. The child accidentally turned the key, causing the car to move backwards and strike the grandmother, who later died from her injuries.
The pleadings were evaluated by a three-member professional jury consisting of Ernő Simon, Chief Appellate Prosecutor of the Debrecen Regional Appellate Prosecutor’s Office, Olivér Gömöri, Presiding Judge of the Debrecen Court of Appeal, and attorney István Kiss, Vice President of the Debrecen Bar Association. The judges assessed not only legal expertise but also the students’ reasoning, rhetorical abilities, and the structure of their arguments.
“The event provided an excellent opportunity for students to apply the knowledge they acquired in theory in circumstances resembling a real courtroom,” said Veronika Szikora, Dean of the Faculty of Law at the University of Debrecen.
Andrea Noémi Tóth, assistant professor at the Department of Criminal Procedure Law and chief organizer of the competition, added that solving the case and preparing the pleading required a high level of expertise and complex thinking in both substantive criminal law and criminal procedure.
The jury awarded first, second, and third places in both categories, as well as a special prize in each category.
Students from the University of Debrecen achieved excellent results. In the prosecutor category, final-year law student Anna Zsófia Pataki won second place, while in the defence category, fourth-year law student Mária Zsófia Gyökeres finished third.
In the prosecutor category, first place went to Ádám Hegedűs of Eötvös Loránd University, while third place was awarded to Katalin Lili Gyönki of Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary. The special prize in this category went to Rebeka Horváth of the University of Szeged.
In the defence category, Bernát Koch of Eötvös Loránd University won first place. Kristóf Kovács of Pázmány Péter Catholic University finished second, while the category’s special prize was awarded to Adrienn Bakonyi of Széchenyi István University in Győr.
(unideb.hu)
