According to Petra Bárd, lawyers working in the common law system view substantive truth as the end result of some random guessing process.1 According to Károly Bárd, substantive justice is too contingent, too unattainable in practice, and therefore cannot be the pillar of any system of proof. However, the author argues that it is precisely this need for scarcity that has given rise to the alternative of seeking formal justice, which is now clearly reflected in the decisions of the Court of Justice and therefore has a well-developed toolbox across the continent. “Procedural justice can compensate for the inevitable shortcomings of cognizance in litigation and can make decisions whose substantive justice we are not convinced of acceptable. […] The advantage of procedural justice is that it is feasible. There is no guarantee that a criminal conviction will always reflect the true facts, nor that it will always satisfy the requirement of substantive justice. However, there is no obstacle in principle to the legislature formulating rules that satisfy the principle of due process, and compliance with such rules can be monitored by both the individuals concerned and the community.” 2

 

These views are only strengthened by the decisions of the AB, which have ruled that (1) the Constitution does not grant a subjective right to the discovery of substantive truth, nor to the fact that a court judgment is not unlawful; (2) since there are no corrective techniques to remove the limitations of the discovery of substantive truth in a trial, its achievement is only a [principle] possibility; the enforcement of the procedural guarantees laid down in the Constitution [Alapticle] is a basic requirement. 15