Battle over NGO financing heats up again in Brussels as MEPs seek investigation

Thank you.

Two right-wing political groups at the European Parliament are trying for the second time to establish a committee to investigate European Commission contracts with NGOs.

The MEPs from the ECR and Patriots for Europe, together with some members from the centre-right EPP, have claimed for some months that the Commission effectively paid environmental NGOs to lobby for its Green Deal policy in a clandestine manner.

The Commission says that these agreements are not secret, but we will see.

We are now going to submit targeted data requests, and we would like to get to know the content of these lobby agreements.

The European Commission will have the opportunity to present them, and it will have the opportunity to prove that it itself also validates those democratic principles, which in other cases, in every case,

But according to the director of the NGO Transparency International, the most recent claims to surface have been debunked many times and the Commission does not pay for shadow lobbying.

NGOs fear that this is a part of a coordinated attack

on civil society.

These coordinated attacks that we've seen from this House over the last six months have three very clear objectives.

They're meant to discredit NGOs.

They're meant to distract NGOs to try and counter these false narratives in the press.

But ultimately, unfortunately, the ultimate objective is to defund NGOs.

And we are about to see this play out in the new budget negotiations that are going to take place over the next several years.

Transparency International has reacted by turning to the Commission and to Parliament themselves with a complaint about what they suspect is an unlawful leak of confidential data.

Well, we've had a handful of MEPs have access to a limited amount of confidential documents that they are using to leak to journalists as part of a smear campaign against NGOs.

There are rules in place on how these documents must be handled because they're confidential, and there's no accountability in this House on these leaks.

And so I intend to submit a formal complaint both to the Commission as well as the President of the Parliament.

Over the weekend, the European Commission denied German media allegations of secret contracts between itself and NGOs.

And a spokesperson told Euronews that the Commission exercises a high degree of transparency when it comes to providing funding to NGOs.