EP committee doesn't recommend lifting Magyar's immunity

The immunity of Péter Magyar, Klára Dobrev, and Ilaria Salis shouldn't be waived, according to a draft resolution adopted on Tuesday by the European Parliament's Legal Affairs Committee, as reported by EUrologus and Euronews. The same decision has been confirmed by Euractiv, several Italian newspapers, including La Repubblica, and Salis' faction, the GUE/NGL.

The legal affairs committee made a decision on three cases of immunity related to Hungary on Tuesday. The committee had to issue an opinion on whether to lift the immunity of Péter Magyar, president of the Tisza Party, Klára Dobrev, president of the Democratic Coalition (DK), and Ilaria Salis, an Italian antifa activist who was under prosecution in Hungary and was then released after being elected to the EP.

The committee formally only issues recommendations, while the final decision must be made by the entire EP. Tuesday's decisions will nevertheless carry considerable weight: the plenary session could in theory still reject the committee's opinion, but as we previously reported, from 2019 onwards, the proposals of the legal committee have been voted through each time. The Legal Affairs Committee conducts its proceedings in closed sessions and treats them as confidential, and MEPs are in principle not allowed to disclose any information about them.

EUrologus learned of the outcome on the cases of Magyar and Salis from one of the representatives leaving the meeting, and shortly afterwards received information that the request for waiving Dobrev's immunity had also been rejected.

Dobrev asked the Socialists not to vote in favour of waiving Magyar's immunity

Before Tuesday's vote, Klára Dobrev announced on Facebook: “I asked the members of the Alliance of the Socialists and Democrats, my European friends, to vote no at the committee meeting. In other words, not to suspend Péter Magyar's immunity.”

The Socialists are the second biggest faction in the EP, only behind the European People's Party, of which the Tisza Party is a member as well. The committees are made up of representatives in proportion to the size of the factions.

"I don't know what happened at that particular nightclub," Dobrev wrote, referring to the incident because of which the Hungarian authorities had requested that Magyar’s immunity be waived. She added that she didn’t know "what the real story is about that particular cell phone," but "one thing I know for sure. That the justice system in Hungary has not been independent for a long time. That if Péter Polt accuses someone, it is not at all certain that they are guilty. In a democratic country, an independent court should be allowed to do its job and decide whether someone is guilty or innocent. Unfortunately, this is not the case in our country. We are not voting to suspend Péter Magyar's immunity because there is no guarantee that his case will be heard by a truly independent and impartial court in a trial that would be fair in every respect”.

Before the vote, Fidesz MEP Tamás Deutsch posted on Facebook that, in line with the proposal, Péter Magyar's immunity would not be suspended. According to the head of the Fidesz–KDNP EP delegation, this means that "he will have a document stating that he is "serving others’ interests", that he is "nothing more than a Brussels-backed brat". "They are rescuing him from being prosecuted for a criminal offense through political interference, by ignoring the law and are thus grossly misusing his immunity," Deutsch said, adding that this is being done even though Magyar had previously argued in favor of having his immunity waived.

Prior to the vote, Politico reported, citing three sources, that Magyar and Dobrev's immunity would not be suspended, but that the situation regarding Salis, a member of the far-left faction, was less clear and that majority decision could depend on the EPP. According to La Repubblica and Euractiv, the vote to dismiss the request to waive her immunity ended up being 13-12. Adrián Vázquez Lázara, who was responsible for the report, told Euractiv that he had proposed a compromise text before the vote, which would have allowed Salis' immunity to be lifted only after the final judgment, but this was not accepted by the left-wing factions.

What are the three cases against Magyar?

There have been three suspension proceedings initiated against Péter Magyar altogether. EP President Roberta Metsola first announced in October last year that they had received a request to lift Magyar's immunity. Shortly before that, the Hungarian Prosecutor General's Office had issued a statement saying that this had been requested by the Hungarian authorities after Magyar allegedly took someone's cell phone at an entertainment venue and threw it into the Danube.

A second, similar request was announced barely a month later. According to information from EUrologus that coincides with our own, it was former Fidesz politician György Simonka who submitted this one. He had previously said to Népszava that he would be initiating criminal and civil proceedings against Magyar. In response to an earlier inquiry from us, the Prosecutor General's Office stated that the state prosecutor's office had only filed a request in the first case. The legal committee began dealing with these two cases in January.

In May, Metsola announced a third request. Although this happened shortly after Magyar's stock market transactions began to be investigated, in May, the Prosecutor General's Office indicated that they were still in the investigation phase and that it was not them who had initiated the third request. László Toroczkai, president of the far-right Mi Hazánk, announced on TikTok in April that they had filed a complaint against Magyar for defamation. They referred to the fact that he had referred to them as a satellite party of Fidesz, that he had claimed that Dóra Dúró regularly consults with Máté Kocsis, the leader of the Fidesz faction in the Hungarian parliament, and "said something about us being Russian agents," but the case was suspended due to Magyar's immunity.

The charge against Dobrev came from a former president's sister

According to Index, in August last year, the Second and Third District Court in Budapest proposed that Klára Dobrev, an MEP and by now also the president of the Democratic Coalition ( DK) be stripped of her immunity. Dobrev was accused by Gáborné Pölöskei Áder Annamária. The sister of the former head of state, János Áder initiated criminal proceedings because Dobrev had claimed that she was culpable in the pedophile clemency scandal.

At the beginning of March last year, DK demanded the resignation of Gáborné Pölöskei Annamária Áder, citing the fact that she was the head of the Education, Child and Youth Protection Department at the Budapest Municipal Council in 2011, and according to them, several people had submitted reports at the time about the director of the Bicske children's home having sexually abused a young child.

Former President János Áder responded to the accusation by saying that it was not true that his sister had done nothing in 2011 when she learned that the director of the Bicske children's home may have committed pedophile crimes. According to him, she informed the Chief Notary about the complaint against the director, which led to preparations for a criminal complaint, and later, in 2011, an investigation was launched, but it was closed in 2012 without anyone being held accountable. It was only years later that new criminal proceedings were launched, in which the director of the children's home and Endre K., who was involved in the clemency scandal, were both convicted.

Last March, Mrs. Pölöskei filed a private case for defamation committed before the public, after Dobrev had claimed that as head of the department, Áder's sister had known about the pedophile director in Bicske but did nothing about it. With this, “Klára Dobrev claimed nothing less than that I had committed a crime. However, such a statement is not the expression of a political opinion protected by freedom of speech, but defamation, regardless of whether the person concerned is a public figure or not.”

"They initiated the lifting of my immunity because of Fidesz's pedophile network," Dobrev wrote last year upon hearing the news of the charge. "If Fidesz thinks they can silence us, they are sorely mistaken, because I am actually quite happy about this." She added that in her opinion "Gáborné Pölöskei Áder Annamária is a small fish in this game, but her complaint will make it possible to request documents and hear witnesses in court," and the case – "in which there could have been no pardon granted if it hadn't been ordered from the highest level" – will be back on the agenda.

Salis called a press conference for Wednesday

Ilaria Salis is among those suspected by Hungarian authorities of attacking people in Budapest in 2023, who to them appeared to be (because they wore camouflage-colored clothing) supporters of the far-right. The attacks happened on the anniversary of the attempt by Hungarian and German soldiers to break out from being encircled by Russian troops in Budapest at the end of World War II, which – although officially banned – has been commemorated in some form by far-right groups for a while.

Salis was arrested last February on charges of attempting to inflict life-threatening bodily harm as part of a criminal organization and could face up to 11 years in prison. The Italian woman pleaded not guilty, and no final judgment has yet been handed down against her.

When she was led to court in shackles, it caused a diplomatic scandal between the Italian and Hungarian governments.

Her family and one of her former cellmates complained that she was being held in inhumane conditions in the Hungarian prison, but the National Penitentiary Headquarters (BVOP) rejected these claims.

She was nominated as a candidate for the EP elections last June by a party belonging to the far-left GUE/NGL faction and was subsequently elected. This gave her immunity, and the Hungarian authorities released her and suspended the court case against her, but requested that her immunity be lifted.

Last week, Salis wrote that the matter had reached a "decisive stage" because the legal committee was about to discuss "the Orbán regime's request to suspend my immunity." Salis wrote that this immunity had helped her "escape from the cesspool of cursed Hungarian abuse and humiliation" and that if her immunity were suspended, that's where she would "go back to." She wrote that she hoped that this wouldn’t happen and that the EP would "not bow to Orbán's new, aggressive nationalism."

Politico recently reported that, in Salis's case, the center-right European People's Party was expected to contribute to a majority in favor of suspending her immunity. According to the GUE/NGL, the person responsible for the case, Adrián Vázquez Lázara of the People's Party, did not submit his report on time, which is why the vote originally scheduled for June had to be postponed. They saw the delay as evidence that there was no consensus behind the "highly politicized" procedure.

This was presumably emphasized because, as we have previously reported, the EP may refuse to suspend a person's immunity if it sees political motives behind the case against the MEP in question. The fact that Zoltán Kovács, Hungarian State Secretary responsible for Government Communication, for instance posted a photoshopped image of Salis's face behind bars and then sent her a message on X with the coordinates of the Máriánosztra women's prison may not help to refute this narrative. The GUE/NGL also referred to the latter as an example in their statement after the vote.

In his reaction to the news that Magyar gets to keep his immunity, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán wrote:

“This is shameful and disgraceful. We haven't seen anything like this since the fall of communism. Today it has been confirmed in Brussels that the leader of the opposition is a man of Brussels.”