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European Commission Rejects Request to Expose NGO Funding

March 27, 2025
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The Patriots for Europe group has submitted 86 requests for information to the European Commission, its Directorates-General and agencies on the funding of NGOs, but received negative responses, Fidesz MEP Csaba Dömötör told MTI in Brussels on Thursday.

The politician was attending a conference on transparency in NGO funding organized by MCC Brussels and the Patriots EP group. The MEP said that “political activist groups have been funded with European taxpayers’ money, but there is no transparent, uniform database on how they have been funded.”

The European Commission is rejecting the request for full data on various “absurd” grounds: firstly, it claimed that the request was not for specific contracts but for general information. Then, they argued that the request is too broad, he explained. Thirdly, they said that all the necessary information was available on the official website, “but this was simply not the case,” Csaba Dömötör noted.

The Patriots will submit a second round of full data requests, and will also appeal to the European Ombudsman, and if these lists are not released, they could take the matter to court,

he underlined.

The MEP pointed out that their request is a standard practice in Hungary. “The Hungarian ministries are obliged to publish regularly what contracts they conclude, with whom and for how much. Moreover, if someone makes a data request to them, they have to provide access not only to the contracts but also to their performance within the time limits set by law,” he explained.

Csaba Dömötör stressed that this is a network of political activists, not civil society in the traditional sense. “When, for instance, Guy Verhofstadt, the former leader of the Liberals (ed.: Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe/ALDE), receives a grant of six billion forints (ed.: 15 million euros) for his own organization, that he calls a civil society organization, this is not civil society activity, but political networking,” he said. In his view, the same is true when organizations receive Brussels funds which later attack Hungary in court, for example over border protection – this is “political interference.”

It is precisely the democratic principles that they refuse to respect, when it comes to themselves, that they expect of everyone else. We want to see a change in this,”

he emphasized.

Speaking at the opening of the conference, Csaba Dömötör said that the new US administration had cancelled 80% of USAID (United States Agency for International Development) contracts because it believed they served ideological purposes. At the same time, a major scandal has erupted around former EU Commissioner Frans Timmermans, who is suspected of having given large sums of money to so-called NGOs, which in return conveyed the Commission’s views and organized demonstrations against political opponents, such as green activists against farmers.

In his view, the Brussels institutions regularly give millions of euros to organizations, but “these subsidies are almost exclusively for liberal and left-wing political purposes.”

They weaken states in the area of migration control, organize political attacks on legitimate governments and carry out censorship under the heading of fact-checking,”

the politician said.

András László, Fidesz MEP, told the conference that “many NGOs are in fact an extension of the arm of governments,” not independent civil society actors, as recent corruption scandals such as “Qatargate” in the European Parliament or “the Timmermans green scandal show.”

“These cases highlight the need for transparency: knowing where money comes from, what it is spent on and who is really behind the organizations, because in many cases ‘NGOs are lobbyists, front organizations for foreign governments or harmful business interests’,” the politician explained.

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Via MTI, Featured image: Pixabay





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