The European Commission’s rule of law report published last week is wrong in many ways, it cannot constitute as a basis for any further discussions related to the rule of law, Justice Minister Judit Varga concluded in an article published on the Brussels news portal EUObserver on Thursday.
Ms. Varga highlighted that the report is based on an arbitrary scope in which the European Commission does not follow a single well-established standard. The notion that there exists a generally accepted definition of rule of law that may serve as the basis of a comprehensive review remains the subject of serious debate, she wrote.
She pointed out that media pluralism, for example – as opposed to media freedom – is clearly not a rule of law issue. The same applies to the transparent allocation of state advertising or public information campaigns where – contrary to the Commission’s position – no well-established European standards may be identified, the text reads.
Protection of the rights of ethnic and national minorities or the national frameworks addressing anti-Semitism are notably absent. Corruption appears in the report, but the text remains silent on money-laundering where systemic institutional failures have been exposed recently in some Member States, the Minister stated.
While the Commission claims that it evaluates all Member States based on uniform and objective criteria, the text fails to make mention of breaches committed in other Member States. Such tendentious interpretation of the rule of law results in a focus on a few pre-determined Member States, namely Hungary and Poland, the Minister pointed out.
Ms. Varga highlighted, among several other examples, that Hungary and Belgium were subjects of the same number of reports on the Council of Europe’s platform to promote the protection of journalism in the period of 2019-2020.
According to the Commission’s interpretation, however, in Hungary there is a “systemic obstruction” of independent media, while in Belgium, intimidation is “relatively rare,” she wrote.
She also highlighted that since the Commission does not have the resources or the expertise to maintain its own monitoring system, its report is based mostly on external sources.
Its reliability and objectivity, therefore, depend on the selection and quality of these sources, the selection of which, unfortunately, is non-transparent and biased, she observed.
The Minister further drew attention to the fact that in the chapter of the report concerning Hungary, the European Commission relies on fourteen documents of twelve non-governmental organisations. Of these, 13 sources come from 11 CSOs that have recently received financial support from the Open Society Foundations, Ms. Varga wrote. She stated that in fact, the report had been written by these CSOs, even the parts that seemingly come from other sources.
In her view, the report also comes at a very unfortunate time, as tensions over the budget and coronavirus recovery package negotiations are running high.
“It plays into the hands of those who never genuinely supported European recovery and reconstruction and puts at risk the possibility for quick and effective action by reopening questions already settled in the July European Council conclusions,” she wrote.
The European Commission’s first rule of law report certainly did not strengthen mutual trust or a sense of community, but it clarifies the picture. We now see rule of law for what it is: a tool to advance a political agenda, the Justice Minister added.