The Centre for Fundamental Rights, the Danube Institute, the Nézőpont Institute and the Századvég Foundation have turned to the European Commission in a letter expressing their concerns that as long as Gábor Magyar, who is known to be linked to the Soros network, is responsible for the Hungarian report on the rule of law, no objective, unbiased and realistic report on Hungary can be produced. The views of the right-wing, conservative voices are regularly omitted from the document, contrary to the views of the Brussels-based Open Society organisations such as Human Rights Watch, Open Society European Policy Institute, Amnesty International and, of course, Transparency International. As before, we have not received a reply to our request this time either.   

Previous rule of law reports have clearly shown that Member States are not measured by the same objective standards. While in the case of Hungary several questions were raised that were factually incorrect, in the case of other countries the Commission did not even mention whether there was a crisis of the rule of law. The ‘rule of law’ reports are a perfect example of the Commission’s double standards: while governments that stand up for national interests are stigmatised in the Brussels report, serious violations of the rule of law are hushed up in the case of Member States that follow the ideological-political line dictated by the Commission. To give just a few examples: in Spain, there are serious problems with constitutionality under the socialist government; the murder of journalists in the Netherlands, online and personal threats against press workers in Belgium and Sweden, and high levels of corruption in Austria were not mentioned in previous reports. 

In February this year, on behalf of the above-mentioned institutions, we therefore reiterated our concerns about Gábor Magyar, who, as the defender of Béla Biszku, tried to undermine the legal proceedings launched in 2014 against the Minister of the Interior in the context of the brutal repression of the post-revolutionary (1956) period, by questioning the independence and impartiality of the judiciary. We refuse to participate in this travesty as a tool of political blackmail against our country until Magyar is replaced, as we are convinced that the moral integrity and impartiality of such a person cannot be guaranteed and that he is therefore totally unfit to conduct an objective investigation into the rule of law.