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December 8, 2017 www.intellinews.com I Page 3
Hungary gets two invitations to court
The third country that will find itself in the dock over migrants, Hungary, was also informed on December 7 that the European Commission would be suing it over laws targeting foreign NGOs and a university founded by the US billion- aire and Hungarian-born financier George Soros. Hungary’s populist national conservative govern- ment has aggressively targeted Soros as a liberal political activist who would expose Hungarians to intolerable levels of migration. Soros has lately hit back at Budapest’s smear campaign.
At a press conference in Brussels on Decem- ber 7, Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Peter Szijjarto said the EU’s mandatory re- settlement quotas are impossible to implement.
IMF lays down the law to Poroshenko as donors lose patience with Ukraine
losing patience with the obvious reluctance of Po- roshenko’s administration to take any decisive ac- tions to curb endemic corruption. Western Europe has already been suffering from “Ukraine fatigue” and is increasingly distracted by its own internal political issues.
Ukraine’s relations with its donors have taken
a sharp turn for the worse in the last month as infighting between the General Prosecutor’s Of- fice (GPO), which is under Poroshenko’s direct control, and the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU), the independent anti-graft body set up at donors’ insistence, came out into the open.
What was remarkable about Lagarde’s comments was their specificity: she named all the parts of the proposed independent anti-graft apparatus, including NABU as well as the Special Anti-Cor-
He added that they are clearly unreasonable and amount to a violation of EU rules. Budapest would defend its position before the ECJ, he said.
“Hungary is in a major dispute with the European Parliament’s Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE) with relation to illegal immigration, which is a key determining issue from the perspective of the continent’s future,” the minister was quoted as saying by Hungarian government website kormany.hu.
In early September, Szijjarto accused the ECJ of waving through a political "rape of European law and values" by rejecting a challenge from Hunga- ry and Slovakia to Brussels’ compulsory migrant relocation deal.
ruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO), which per- forms the same function as the GPO but is entirely independent from the government’s control. What is missing from the triumvirate is a court to hear the cases investigated by NABU and prosecuted by SAPO.
According to the IMF statement, Poroshenko is going to submit a bill to establish the missing anticorruption court "consistent with the Venice Commission’s recommendations and past agree- ments under the IMF-supported programme...
It will be important that all members of the par- liament unite behind the bill and approve it as a matter of priority," Lagarde added.
The reference to the “Venice Commission’s rec- ommendations” is an important one as this com- mission has sent Ukraine an extremely detailed draft of how the bill should look. The government has drawn up its own version, but with this state- ment the IMF are in effect insisting that the do- nors write the law.
This is a pivotal moment for Ukraine and its relationship with the west. Due to foot dragging on many key reform efforts the IMF has already