The French Secretary of State for European Affairs, Clément Beaune, justified on the evening of Monday 31 January the choice to organise an Article 7 hearing of Hungary in May, therefore after the Hungarian parliamentary elections in April, “so as not to interfere” with the electoral process. Poland’s hearing will take place on 22 February in Brussels.
Calling Article 7 procedures important, even “serious” for the countries concerned, he said it was “important, when there is an election deadline, to give these countries room to manoeuvre ”.
However, the Frenchman said that Hungary would be one of the five countries whose rule of law situation will be discussed in March in the framework of the review of the Commission’s annual report on the rule of law, along with Malta, the Netherlands, Austria and Luxembourg.
In front of the MEPs of the European Parliament Committee on Civil Liberties, Clément Beaune also explained why the French Presidency of the EU Council refuses to move to a vote to establish recommendations, thus activating the next step of the Article 7 procedure, as requested by the European Parliament in 2020 in an own-initiative report.
The Secretary of State said it was important to “reset” the procedures through the hearings, as“it has been several months” since any hearings took place. The last hearing exercise took place under the Portuguese Presidency of the EU Council at the end of June 2021 (see EUROPE 12746/1). He explained that “the priority does not seem to be to move to a vote”, which also requires a 4/5 majority.
The Secretary of State acknowledged that Article 7, which ultimately requires unanimity to decide to deprive a member country of its voting rights in the EU Council, had its “limits”, but that the debate on this subject had the merit of nourishing the “ecosystem” on the rule of law, to which other tools such as the annual reports, as well as the regulation on the conditionality of European funds, contribute.
French Greens/EFA MEP Gwendoline Delbos-Corfield, for her part, challenged the decision to let the parliamentary elections pass first, saying that these hearings “should not always be subject to the ups and downs” of European or national events. The Frenchwoman, who is in charge of the Hungarian Article 7 ‘case’, also deplored the fact that Clément Beaune had “refused” to meet her on several occasions, which the Secretary of State disputed.
Other elected representatives, notably from Fidesz, continued to denounce ideologically motivated procedures against Hungary and Poland and hijacked the case “for political reasons”, some of them even referring to “crusades”.
The Frenchman also referred to the informal meeting of the General Affairs Council to be held in Arles at the beginning of March, which will be devoted to the defence of the principles of the rule of law in the Member States. (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)