Battle over NGO financing heats up again in Brussels as MEPs seek investigation
Three right-wing political groups seek to re-table a proposal to establish an investigative committee at the European Parliament, as Transparency International files a complaint against MEPs leaking sensitive NGO contracts to the press.
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00:00Two 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.
00:14The 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.
00:28A committee says that these positions are not useful, but we will see it, because we are going to provide a goal for these positions, and we would like to recognize these lobby positions.
00:42The European Commission will be the opportunity to express them, and the opportunity to confirm that they will be the same and the democratic interests of themselves, which they will pay for the parties.
00:56But according to the director of the NGO Transparency International,
01:00the most recent claims to surface have been debunked many times,
01:04and the commission does not pay for shadow lobbying.
01:07NGOs fear that this is a part of a coordinated attack on civil society.
01:12These coordinated attacks that we've seen from this House over the last six months
01:16have three very clear objectives.
01:18They're meant to discredit NGOs.
01:20They're meant to distract NGOs to try and counter these false narratives in the press.
01:24But ultimately, unfortunately, the ultimate objective is to defund NGOs.
01:29And we are about to see this play out in the new budget negotiations
01:32that are going to take place over the next several years.
01:34Transparency International has reacted by turning to the commission and to parliament themselves
01:38with a complaint about what they suspect is an unlawful leak of confidential data.
01:45Well, we've had a handful of MEPs have access to a limited amount of confidential documents
01:50that they are using to leak to journalists as part of a smear campaign against NGOs.
01:56There are rules in place on how these documents must be handled because they're confidential.
02:00And there's no accountability in this House on these leaks.
02:04And so I intend to submit a formal complaint both to the commission as well as the president of the parliament.
02:08Over the weekend, the European Commission denied German media allegations of secret contracts between itself and NGOs.
02:18And a spokesperson told Euronews that the commission exercises a high degree of transparency