Hungarians have right to know how NGOs have spent EU monies

Hungarians have the right to know what NGOs have spent the huge amounts of money they have received from the European Union on, the EU affairs ministry’s ministerial commissioner said in Brussels on Thursday.

“Skeletons have been coming out of the closet over the past weeks,” Boglárka Bólya said after meeting EU officials to discuss the transparency of funding for NGOs.

She said that last week the European Commission “admitted” that some EU-financed NGOs had engaged in “unjustified lobbying” in connection with the LIFE programme supporting the EU’s environmental and climate policy, while this week a report by the European Court of Auditors noted shortcomings in the transparency of databases related to the financing of NGOs, something that Hungarian government had been pointing out “for a very long time”.

Bólya said a fresh study showed that politically active NGOs had directly received at least 62 million euros over the past ten years.

“The Hungarian government’s position is clear: political corruption uncovered by the Trump administration must not be allowed to continue in Europe,” she said.

Bólya noted the Patriots EP group have set up the Democracy and Freedom Committee to investigate abuses that violated democratic rights and the rule of law in the European Union.

The committee’s relevance, she said, was clear since for years Brussels had worked to hinder right-wing, sovereignist, conservative governments that oppose the mainstream. Double standards were “so high that everyone in Brussels is silent about the fact that the rule of law is currently being dismantled in Poland in the name of the rule of law,” she said. The committee, she added, would investigate and reveal such abuses to the public, Bólya said in her statement.

Read also:

• Fidesz MEP: EP admits Tisza intended beneficiary of rule-of-law procedure against Hungary
• ‘This can’t be decided without us’: Hungary prepares vote on Ukraine’s EU bid