EP committe mission to be “one sided”?

The programme of an upcoming vis1t by the European Parliament’s committee for culture and education (CULT) to Hungary has “turned out to be one-sided”, Tamás Deutsch, MEP of Hungary’s ruling Fidesz, said on Wednesday and suggested that the committee had dismissed his party’s recommendations.

Fidesz MEP Andrea Bocskor and others had “recommended a number of institutions and people” for the committee to contact while in Hungary but they “neglected the most fundamental expectations of impartiality and variety”, Deutsch insisted in a letter to Sabine Verheyen, the head of the committee.

Deutsch said the programme was imbalanced, giving a disproportionately large focus to “opposition, leftist or liberal politicians, activists, institutions, journalists and civil organisations critical of the government”. A fact finding mission, however, should “examine the relevant issued from several sides”, he added. While the programme includes meetings with “some two dozen militant anti-government” figures, the delegation will “meet only a few government players”, in “complete disregard of the rightist, bourgeois, national, conservative and Christian Democratic workshops”, he said, adding that the mission therefore would not get a “credible, objective and complete view of (Hungary’s) reality”.

“The way the programme was made reinforces the suspicion that its one-sided character had not been caused by a lack of prudence but by a deliberate political intent,” Deutsch said.

Read alsoEP committe mission to be “one sided”?

Source: MTI