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Too little, too late : four reasons why EU sanctions against Hungary do not work
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Verfassungsblatt, 2024, No. 1, pp. 130-132
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SZENTE, Zoltán, Too little, too late : four reasons why EU sanctions against Hungary do not work, Verfassungsblatt, 2024, No. 1, pp. 130-132 - https://hdl.handle.net/1814/77037
Abstract
All signs indicate that the various procedures and instruments invented and used by the European Commission to improve the situation of the rule of law in Hungary have so far not been successful: the Article 7 TEU procedure, launched at the initiative of the European Parliament and which could lead to the suspension of a country’s voting rights in EU institutions in the event of a systemic breach of the rule of law, has been frozen for years; the European Commission’s monitoring reports on the situation of the rule of law in the member states, including Hungary, prepared under the so-called Rule of Law Mechanism, which have always indicated serious problems in this country, have been consistently denied by the Hungarian government. Then, in 2022, the European Commission suspended several payments from the Cohesion Fund and the Recovery and Resilience Fund until Hungary had met the so-called horizontal conditions and 27 milestones respectively; but freezing these funds has not made significant progress in restoring the rule of law so far. In fact, apart from a few sham measures, democracy and rule of law, in their simplest definitions (the possibility to overthrow the incumbent government through free and fair elections, and the limitation of political power by law) are in a worse situation in Hungary today than when the various mechanisms for protecting the rule of law were launched or payments were suspended. Why have the tools used by the European Union so far proven ineffective? Finding the causes of a complex phenomenon is never easy, but the experience of recent years makes it possible to identify some that can explain this failure.
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First published online on Verfassungblog: 26 January 2024