According to the new Rule of Law Report released by the European Commission on 24 July, Italy, Hungary, and Slovakia performed poorly regarding the continued decline in democratic standards threatening the effective prosecution of corruption, the independence of the judicial system, and the safety of journalists.
The meeting explored the application of artificial intelligence in the legal field. They reviewed best practices on how artificial intelligence can be employed in judicial practices and legal services to enhance the efficiency of law enforcement, citing the anonymization of documents as an example.
The Hungarian government has taken a decisive step following Kyiv’s decision to halt Lukoil’s oil shipments to Hungary and Slovakia via Ukraine. According to Hungarian Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade Péter Szijjártó, Budapest will block payments from the European Peace Facility, amounting to approximately €6.5 billion, until Kyiv restores uninterrupted oil transit.
After a long time, Europe has the opportunity to take its future into its own hands, restore its long-lost prestige, and promote peace in Ukraine. Instead, Brussels has initiated a childish vendetta against Hungary over Viktor Orbán’s peace mission. Missing such opportunities out of hubris and pettiness demonstrates the utter incompetence of the EU leadership.
Balázs Orbán, the political director of the Hungarian Prime Minister, discussed Viktor Orbán’s peace mission and its impact in a lengthy post on X. He wrote: ‘The winds of change are upon us; it’s time for European leaders to overcome years of war psychosis!’
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced on 18 July that the next EPC summit will be held in Hungary this year, and in Albania and Denmark next year.
Viktor Orbán has been receiving increasing praise from Germany in recent days—something that has not happened for a long time. Henryk M. Broder, a columnist for the German newspaper Die Welt, lauded the Hungarian Prime Minister for his peace mission, stating that, seeing the EU’s failure, Orbán has taken Europe’s fate into his own hands and is doing so quite skillfully. Additionally, a left-wing German MP remarked that Orbán’s peace mission justifies why the EU won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012.
On 18 July the European Parliament re-elected European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen with 401 votes in favour. In her speech before the vote, von der Leyen made numerous political promises for the next five years but also, of course, criticized Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s peace mission.
While left-wing EU politicians are trying to organize a boycott of Hungary’s presidency of the EU Council, Chancellor Karl Nehammer of Austria has stated that he and the ministers of his party is not willing to take part in it, and vowed they will ‘continue to participate in sessions and meetings of the EU Council Presidency’.
There is a lesser-known but in many ways much more influential pillar of the EU’s institutional system than the Commission, the Parliament, and the Council: the Court of Justice of the European Union, which is quietly but steadily building an ever closer union.