The body said that its investigations in the past year had uncovered that the "network exerting political pressure to serve the goals of the US Democrat Party and adjacent business circles, and international progressive circles" was also active in Hungary.

The body said its findings so far "have shown that the operations in Hungary are being financed from abroad by a complex web...

"Until very recently, [funding came from] US government resources including USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the State Department; European Council resources such as the CERV, LIFE and JUST programmes; and the resources of the Open Society Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and the German Marshall Fund that are also involved in redistributing government money," the office said in a statement.

Agencies of the network in Hungary had received from the [previous] US administration via USAID some 3.5 billion forints between 2022 and 2024, it said.

The EC had earmarked 19.5 billion forints for political pressure groups until February, the body added.

The multi-billion euros in uncapped funding programmes are set to run until the end of the EU's 2021-2027 budgetary framework, the office said.

Fidesz MEP: EC 'sending rejections' over NGO funding

The European Parliament's Patriots for Europe group has submitted 86 requests for access to data of public interest to the European Commission over the funding of NGOs, "but the response was rejection", Csaba Domotor, an MEP of ruling Fidesz, said in Brussels.

Domotor told a conference on the transparency of the financing of NGOs, organised by the party group and the Brussels branch of the Mathias Corvinus Collegium, that European taxpayers' money had been used to support politically active groups "but there is no transparent, unified database on how they are financed".

He said the EC had rejected the requests "citing various absurd reasons: first they said the request targeted general information rather than concrete agreements, then that the requests were too wide-ranging, and then that all necessary information was available on their website. They are simply not true," Domotor said.

The party family will submit further requests and also turn to the European ombudsman, and proceed to go to court should the lists not be forthcoming, he said.

"Hungarian ministries are obliged to regularly publish information on the nature of the contracts they conclude, on the contracting parties and on the sums involved ... Further, if someone submits a request for data of public interest, they must allow access to the contracts and their performance within the deadline enshrined in law," he said.

At the same time, the EC "is utterly unwilling to answer to requests for data on Brussels institutions, even as it continues to push for stricter Hungarian laws on the freedom of information," he said.

The issue is with "a network of political activists", not "traditional" civil society, he added.

"When Guy Verhofstadt, an earlier figurehead of the Liberals, receives the equivalent of 6 billion forints [EUR 15m] in funding for his own so-called NGO, that is not nonprofit work, that's building a political network," he said.

Other organisations are suing Hungary at the Court of Justice of the European Union for issues such as border protection. "That is political interference," he said.

"They are shirking the democratic principles they are expecting everyone else to comply with. That is what we want to change," he said.

Domotor said EU institutions regularly supported various organisations "with millions of euros", and insisted that the funding flowed almost exclusively to serve leftist-liberal political agendas. 

"They are weakening the states in migration regulations, organise political attacks against legitimate governments, and use censure under the name of fact-checking."

Those organisations, he insisted, "have no local roots or social legitimacy as 90 percent of their funding comes form outside sources, the European Commission or Soros-linked circles."

Fidesz MEP Andras Laszlo told the conference that many NGOs operated as "the extensions of governments".

He also said that recent corruption scandals had highlighted the importance of transparency: "We must know where the money comes from, what it is spent on, and who are actually behind those organisations..."

He said that 7 central European EU or NATO member states had been "targeted by political interference through USAID projects", Laszlo said. "The support was disbursed without consultation with local government, which also amounts to interference."

Source: 
MTI - The Hungarian News Agency, founded in 1881.

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