The Hungarian government could remove the obstacles which are currently blocking further EU funding due to the rule-of-law conditionality mechanism. The Hungarian NGO Clean Air Action Group has developed a detailed proposal for this, which has been welcomed by the European Commission.

EU legislation sets out the conditions under which a Member State can receive EU funding. One such condition is compliance with the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. This includes, among others, ensuring freedom and pluralism of the media, independent and impartial courts, access to information of public interest, and no political discrimination. Another condition is the development of a public procurement system that is efficient and fair. Clean Air Action Group (CAAG) has listed in detail how it believes Hungary can meet all these conditions.

Image from the video made by Clean Air Action Group on EU funding

EU legislation places particular emphasis on ensuring that EU funding is used to help protect the environment. However, experience so far has shown that in Hungary the use of these funds has lead to a significant deterioration of the environment. Nonetheless, the Recovery and Resilience Plan (RRP) and especially the draft Partnership Agreement (PA) submitted by the Hungarian government to the European Commission foretells a further deterioration of the situation.

András Lukács, President of Clean Air Action Group said: “According to our analysis, the Hungarian Recovery and Resilience Plan does not provide any guarantees that the money from the EU’s Recovery and Resilience Facility will be used in a transparent, fair and environmentally sound way in Hungary. Even worse, we conclude from the draft PA that EU money would be largely used for investments that would significantly damage the environment (including ‘tourism developments’ leading to the destruction of Lake Balaton), while continuing the wasteful and environmentally harmful use of national public money.”

Katalin Tarr, policy officer at Clean Air Action Group, added: “The European Commission has made it clear that no Member State that weakens its environmental legislation would receive EU funding. Unfortunately, in Hungary we have regularly witnessed such weakening over the last two decades. For example, the government has regularly classified investments seriously damaging the environment as ‘priority investments of national importance’, thus practically removing them from the scope of environmental legislation.”