In November 2022 we applied to the Anti-Corruption Task Force, which was founded by the Hungarian government under pressure from the EU Commission. Since then, we regularly get the question why we have joined the group.

As we emphasized at the time, our participation in the Task Force doesn’t mean that we recognise the government's anti-corruption measures, it’s rather about highlighting the measures that have not been taken. Now we briefly summarize our experiences of the past few months, and we also look at the most important points for change.

We have expressed our concerns about the limited competence of the Task Force in our publicly shared application, and we’ve also notedthat we hadn’t seen any sincere commitment behind the anti-corruption actions of the government. Moreover, in several cases the commitments called for by the EUhave been weakened or eroded. We have  called the attention of both the Hungarian public and the EU decision-makers to these cases. We think that our professional materials and our analyses with our partners have contributed to the fact that the EU has strictly held the Hungarian government to its commitments, and has not been satisfied with inadequate anti-corruption and rule of law measures taken without real commitments. On the other hand, the aim of our work is to help put in place measures that will allow Hungary to access EU funds and then use them for the right purposes in a transparent, efficient way.

We specifically joined the Task Force as we now see a real chance to improve the conditions for anti-corruption efforts (e.g. civil, journalist) and to increase the independence of courts. In our application we set out our aims and have been working towards them since then. As we could only partially incorporate these into the first report of the Task Force, we voted against the adoption of it in March. This is just one example of how the last six months of work confirms many of our concerns.

When we joined the Task Force, we pledged, and we are committed to:

cooperate with other organizations active in the field of anti-corruption which are independent from the public authorities and economic interest groups. Together with them we represent the views of the Hungarian civil society and the press in order to create legislation and procedures that facilitate the oversight of public funds. Our additional goal is to provide feedback to government bodies, the wider public and the representatives of EU institutions about the ongoing legislation and its implementation, furthermore, the  institutional change in the coming period.

We set out the following criteria for the effective operation of the Task Force and now -eight months after its launch - we have assessed them.

In addition to improving the efficiency of operations, we considered and consider the following anti-corruption issues to be essential:

• the protection of whistleblowers
• the transparency and regulation of political funding
• new system on asset declarations and the expanded scheme of its control mechanism
• adequate regulation of conflict of interest and revolving door phenomenon
• regulation of lobbying, strategic cooperation and priority government investments
• improving the transparency and accessibility of public databases (e.g. company data, register of ultimate beneficial owners, public procurement data, EU and national aid data, budget data, contract data of public service bodies, land register data)
• wide access to data of public interest and strengthening proactive freedom of information
• the reform of the public procurement system, the improvement of procurement culture and the strengthen of competition
• establishing the independence of public supervisory bodies and improving their preparedness and effectiveness
• effective prosecution and sanctioning of high-level corruption
• joining the European Public Prosecutor's Office
• ensuring the independence of the judiciary
• creating the conditions to recover public assets that have become the victim of corruption
• reform of the institutions and rules that manage and supervise the spending of EU funds and improve the integrity of public tendering procedures
• ensuring public participation in preparing laws (especially for women and under-represented social groups in decision-making)
• strengthening the integrity approach of public administration workers and promoting institutional integrity systems
• expanding  automatic decision-making (e.g. prosecution, court case allocation)
• planning specific measures in areas particularly affected by corruption (construction, information technology, health, public asset management, land tenders, concessions, sports subsidies).

Of the above written, the Task Force’s workplan only includes the topics of public procurement, freedom of information and tender support, but the National Anti-corruption Strategy, which will be soon accepted, will cover some important areas (e.g. lobbying, conflict of interest, revolving door phenomenon, automatic decision-making). The question is how much role will the Task Force play in monitoring and developing concrete implementation steps and proposals. This is reasonable to doubt since  already during the first half a year of the Task Force’s existence a few anti-corruption legislation was adopted (e.g. whistleblower-protection law), the Task Force was however not involved at all in creating or reviewing them. Some of the more sensitive issues that have not been raised in the discussion between the European Commission and the Government (e.g. party funding, accession to the European Public Prosecutor's Office) are unfortunately not expected to be on the agenda of the Task Force for some time.

Translation from Hungarian: Regina Kovács