Court orders Sovereignty Protection Office to pay grievance fee to investigative journalism outlet for damaging its reputation

The Sovereignty Protection Office (SPO) has been condemned by the Budapest Metropolitan Court for damaging the reputation of the investigative journalism nonprofit, Átlátszó. According to the judgment, the office headed by Tamás Lánczi did so by claiming that Átlátszó was financed from abroad and engaged in intelligence and disinformation activities. The Budapest Metropolitan Court has ordered the SPO to pay Átlátszó 3.8 million forints (nearly 10 thousand euros) in damages. The court's ruling is not final, both Átlátszó and the SPO may appeal against it. The lawyer of the SPO did not appear before the court on Thursday when the ruling was announced; only its legal representative, Ákos Pálvölgyi, was present.

According to the decision of the Budapest Metropolitan Court, the Sovereignty Protection Office damaged Átlátszó's reputation by accusing it of misusing data of public interest, intelligence and disinformation activities in a 2024 video, and claiming that its operation is mainly foreign-funded. According to the court, this was a false claim. In its ruling on Thursday, the court ordered the SPO to report on the decision condemning their work on their website. This means that once the judgement becomes final, the office headed by Tamás Lánczi will have to publish a statement acknowledging that it had damaged Átlátszó's reputation with false allegations. The court also ordered the office to refrain from engaging in further unlawful conduct.

In its ruling on Thursday, the court made an important statement about the agency which regularly attacks independent media. In the justification for the ruling, the judge stated that the SPO is not a media outlet but an administrative body, hence it is subject to different rules. The SPO had previously defended itself by claiming that its statements about Átlátszó were merely "investigative conclusions based on facts."

Átlátszó launched a personal rights lawsuit against the Sovereignty Protection Office in November 2024 because the newspaper considers the statements made in a video based on the claims made in the office's report on the newspaper to be "unfounded and, for the most part, downright false." Among other things, the report claimed that Átlátszó was financed from abroad and engaged in disinformation and intelligence activities. The lawsuit itself centred on the video, which the investigative outlet claims damaged its reputation.

On November 11, Miklós Sári, the senior analyst at the Sovereignty Protection Office and head of the analytics department that prepared the report against Átlátszó, gave testimony in the case.

Even before testifying, he argued that the term "intelligence activities" used in the 28-page report and the video based on it could be used in a professional sense, and therefore, in their opinion, Átlátszó had not been wronged in this regard. The head of the team that prepared the report did not understand what was wrong with using the term "intelligence activity," as, according to him "in today's world, open source intelligence is a completely accepted method, and it is carried out by investigative journalists, agencies, and states too," and there is no pejorative connotation to it.

Representatives of the SPO (Miklós Sári, senior analyst, and Ákos Pálvölgyi, legal representative of the office) also said in November that, in their opinion, disinformation does not mean that someone is lying. According to them, disinformation is instead "a structured, deliberately distorting communication practice that has the effect of distorting reality by selecting information and taking it out of context," HVG wrote in its report at the time.

In his testimony, Sári said that Átlátszó's funding comes mainly from abroad and is "provided by the European Commission, foreign states, and George Soros's money-distributing circles," which is "pure mathematics." Átlátszó, on the other hand, reported that the majority of their budget comes from 1 percent donations (Hungarian law allows taxpayers to allocate one percent of their personal income tax to certain organizations or causes of their choosing each year – TN) and other contributions.

In his testimony, Sári also claimed that Átlátszó actively participated in preparing the Sargentini report on the rule of law in Hungary and the European Commission's (EC) rule of law report. According to him, this is evidenced by the fact that Átlátszó was listed as a source in the reports, even though the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade was also listed in the same way.

At the November hearing, Miklós Sári admitted to Átlátszó's lawyer, Balázs Tóth, that he was not aware of any foreign individuals having been involved in the founding of Átlátszó, nor of any foreign individuals or other persons acting on their behalf having ever instructed Átlátszó to make any decisions. When Sári was asked if he could give an example of a disinformation campaign launched by Átlátszó, he pointed to the Sargentini report and the EC's rule of law report, but was unable to say what was untrue in them.

At the first hearing in the case brought by Átlátszó against the SPO, the legal representative of the Sovereignty Protection Office also focused on the term "intelligence activities." He emphasized that they did not use this term in a criminal law sense, but simply in an everyday sense, referring only to the fact that Átlátszó systematically collects, analyzes, and processes information. At the time, the representative of the office said that what the office stated in its report on Átlátszó and in the video based on the report was nothing more than "investigative conclusions based on facts." Incidentally, no one representing the SPO appeared at the first hearing of the case on May 20, so it had to be postponed.

Our previous article details the circumstances surrounding the establishing of the Sovereignty Protection Office, and the video (with English subtitles) below takes a look at how the agency is going about protecting Hungary’s sovereignty: