Hungary warned its democracy could be put under international scrutiny
Hungary has been warned it could be the first country in the EU to have its democracy placed under international scrutiny. An influential committee of the Council of Europe, the Strasbourg-based human rights watchdog (not part of the EU), proposed that Hungary be subject to a "monitoring procedure" that would place the country's democratic rights and liberties under international monitoring, something that has never happened in any of the EU's 27 countries.
The final decision to push ahead with the scrutiny needs to be taken by the council's parliamentary assembly which brings together lawmakers from the organisation's 47 member states. Ten countries outside the EU but members of the council, including Russia and Turkey, are being monitored. The "opinion" delivered by the council's monitoring committee accused Hungary's prime minister Viktor Orbán of seeking to take control of independent institutions in Hungary, of using the constitutional rewriting to cement the power of his own political party, Fidesz, and of ignoring the country's supreme court.
Budapest and Brussels have been at odds for months over curbs on freedom in Hungary, including restrictions on media expression, pressure on judges, control of the central bank. Orbán has consistently and robustly rejected the charges, with his government and diplomats mounting a loud and detailed campaign aimed at disproving the criticism. The committee said Orbán had acted hastily and opaquely in breach of democratic principles, had bypassed the country's constitutional court and was constantly changing the basic law and undermining the constitution in pursuit of "narrow party political interests."
Orbán's Fidesz has a two-thirds majority in the parliament in Budapest. Orbán has used that ascendancy to revise the constitution four times in the past 18 months. The legal changes are also being scrutinised by lawyers at the European commission and in another body of the Council of Europe. "Each of the concerns outlined in this decision is inherently serious in terms of democracy, the rule of law and respect for human rights," the statement said. "Taken separately, they would already warrant close scrutiny by the monitoring committee. In the present case, however, what is striking is the sheer accumulation of reforms that aim at establishing political control of most key institutions while in parallel weakening the system of checks and balances."
