The European Parliament’s PEGA Committee of Inquiry heard on Thursday 16 February from two journalists tapped in Hungary by the Pegasus spyware, David Dercsenyi and Adrien Beauduin, a Belgian citizen also jailed in Hungary after participating in a demonstration in defence of the Central European University, who has since left the country.
While committee chair Jeroen Lenaers (EPP, Dutch) indicated that the PEGA Committee will travel to Hungary next week on a fact-finding mission, MEPs heard about the experience of the two men, who had learned by chance that they had been wiretapped, in 2019 in this case, said the first journalist, whose wife had also been tapped.
According to him, it was an article written about migrants in Greece and the Hungarian secret service that triggered the tapping, but “the government has still not apologised”, David Dercsenyi said.
“Hungarian law says that this information about the collected data cannot be published”, he said, adding that this was “absurd”, responding to MEPs who wanted to know if they had had details of the information collected.
“We have not received any information about these taps”, he repeated. The two men still do not understand how their activities as journalists - and as doctoral students, in the case of the Belgian national - could have alerted the Hungarian intelligence services.
They hoped on Thursday that PEGA’s planned mission to the country would have access to more information on these practices.
However, the PEGA Committee Chairman has already expressed his regret that the Hungarian Minister of Justice, Judit Varga, has not yet responded to the request for a meeting. (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)