Budapest, 15 October, 2024 ° Factual mistakes and serious distortions characterise the report concluding the “specific – and comprehensive – investigation” the Sovereignty Protection Office (SPO) carried out between June and October 2024 against Transparency International (TI) Hungary. Published on the SPO’s website on the 14th of October, the style and content of the report evokes the lengthy political tirades against imperialism and the West that dominated public discourse in communist-era Hungary. Operating with an annual budget of six billion forints (15 million euros) since the beginning of this year, the SPO published its accusations against TI Hungary in a way that breaches its own operating rules. The law establishing the SPO foresees that the organisations investigated by the SPO should be able to react to the findings before publication, and the SPO should respond to these comments. In our case, nothing like this happened. 

Hungary’s Sovereignty Protection Office (SPO) has adopted an operating model often seen in autocracies. Headed by Tamás Lánczi, the SPO’s report on TI Hungary is fantasizing about a United States-led global conspiracy, spy games between great powers, and – of course – György Soros. Among other absurd statements, it claims that Transparency International (TI) Hungary was helping the Alliance of Free Democrats (SzDSz), a Hungarian liberal party that stopped operating in 2014, in its preparations for the 1994 general elections, despite the fact that TI’s Hungarian chapter was established 12 years later, in 2006. 

The report also dwells on the reliability of the Corruption Perception Index (CPI), which is compiled every year by Transparency International’s Berlin-based secretariat. The CPI methodology has always been public therefore it was a wasted effort by the SPO to launch an investigation against TI Hungary to find out more about this widely used index. Furthermore, TI’s secretariat in Berlin requested an audit of the CPI methodology from the European Commission in 2018; the Joint Research Centre found the CPI a suitable index to measure corruption. The now ruling Fidesz party has been well aware of the specificities of the index and used it as a reference point before 2010 – then in opposition – to criticize the conduct of the left-wing government in 2007 and 2008. Back then, Viktor Orbán and Mihály Varga were especially vocal about the need to cut back corruption, citing Hungary’s CPI ranking of that time. 

TI Hungary has stayed true to its mission of exposing and fighting corruption regardless of political developments, thus helping to advance Hungary’s overall development. In the current context – which the European Parliament in 2022 described as a “hybrid electoral autocracy” – it means fighting systemic corruption and democratic backsliding and acting as an independent rule-of-law watchdog organisation. In truth, this is why the CPI has been targeted by the current government through multiple channels, and not the alleged flaws in the methodology. 

The Sovereignty Protection Office also plays a blame game by falsely claiming that TI Hungary’s contribution to the European Commission’s annual rule-of-law reports on Hungary – along with the contributions of other civil society organisations – has led to the launch of the rule-of-law conditionality procedure against Hungary in 2022 and to the subsequent freezing of some EU funds intended for the country. In fact, Hungary cannot access about 20 billion euros worth of EU funding because the country has been plagued with government-led systemic corruption and rule-of-law backsliding. 

TI Hungary is not surprised to see such a slopwork emerging from the SPO, which is staffed with people who were “III/III” secret agents in communist-era Hungary, or are publicly questioning the legacy of the 1956 revolution. 

Looking at the report, it is obvious that the SPO was searching for ammunition to back up its baseless claims formulated about TI Hungary way before the start of the investigation. The report fails to make any valid conclusions about our organisation. An iconic Hungarian communist-era movie, the “Witness” (Tanú) springs to mind: the verdict is passed before the investigation begins. 

It is a baseless criticism that TI Hungary’s operations are not sufficiently transparent; our organisation complies with all the legal requirements and more: we voluntarily publish every year an independent audit report on our finances as a supplement to our public benefit report. In fact, a lot of the data in the SPO’s report has been taken from our website and annual reports – so perhaps TI Hungary is not such an obscure organisation after all. 

Moreover, the SPO would have been legally obliged to share its draft report with us before publication (paragraph 6, section 8 of the 2023 Sovereignty Protection Act). We should have had fifteen days to make comments, and the SPO thirty days to give us reasoned answers. Nothing like this happened. The SPO, however, must have leaked the report to Magyar Nemzet – a formerly prestigious newspaper that had been transformed into a flagship propaganda outlet by successive Fidesz governments – before publication. Otherwise, it would be inconceivable how several media outlets with clear ties to the government could publish excerpts from the report before it was officially made available on the website of the SPO.  

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TI Hungary, along with several other civil society organisations, heavily criticised the Sovereignty Protection Act before its adoption. Shortly after the start of the “specific – and comprehensive – investigation” by the SPO against TI Hungary and Átlátszó.hu, we filed a constitutional complaint with the Constitutional Court because we hold that both the Sovereignty Protection Act and the establishment and operation of the Sovereignty Protection Office violate the Fundamental Law. 

TI Hungary is also considering taking further legal action concerning the factual mistakes and baseless assumptions in the SPO’s report. 

The European Commission opened an infringement procedure against Hungary in February over the Sovereignty Protection Act, which the Commission says violates several provisions of primary and secondary EU law, including: the EU’s democratic values, the principle of democracy and the electoral rights of EU citizens, a number of fundamental rights enshrined in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, the requirements of EU law on data protection; and several rules applicable to the internal market. 

The Commission referred Hungary to the European Court of Justice in October because – after assessing the reply of the Hungarian authorities – the Commission maintained most of the grievances identified, which it said had not been addressed. Despite the Commission’s request for an expedited procedure, we might have to wait 12-18 months for a decision by the European Court of Justice. We fear that during this time the government will continue harassing civil society organisations, journalists, or even companies and individuals with proceedings like the one TI Hungary has been subjected to.