Hungary’s Sovereignty Protection Office has asked the European Commission to reveal what contributions NGOs financed from abroad made to rule-of-law reports against Hungary.
The EC asked several Hungarian NGOs, most of them financed from abroad, to write “shadow reports”, the office said in a statement on Thursday.
The NGOs included Amnesty International Hungary, the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, Political Capital, and Transparency International, the statement added.
The reports’ content has been kept under wraps, Tamas Lanczi, the office’s head, said. In his letter he asked Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, to make the reports accessible.
Further, Lanczi said von der Leyen should make clear the criteria by which the NGOs were selected and which parts of the reports were prepared by Transparency International Hungary on the basis of which data, as well as which parts were used in the final version of reports.
Also, the EC should disclose details of the financial support for NGOs that contributed to the reports received by the European Commission and the European Parliament, the letter said.
The conditions for democracy must be in place so that informed voters can express their will in free and fair elections, the letter said, adding that any attempt to influence or manipulate public opinion “is a serious threat” to Hungary’s sovereignty.
Lanczi said the EP June 1, 2023 resolution (INGE 2 report) underpinned Hungary position, and Hungary’s parliament established the Sovereignty Protection Office to ensure that the salient conditions of the EP’s relevant position could be enforced to the greatest extent possible.
The office is now carrying out a probe focusing on individual disinformation efforts and associated processes, the statement said.
It is of particular relevance to this “mapping investigation” that several NGOs that contributed views to the rule-of-law report were either partly or entirely financed from third countries outside the EU, the statement added.
