Hungary Opens Corruption Appeals

Hungary changed its criminal procedure law on 26 August to allow any person or organisation to challenge decisions that close, or refuse to open, corruption investigations. Police and prosecutors must now send anonymised versions of those decisions to the Integrity Authority, Hungary's anti-corruption watchdog, which will publish them online. From that point, there is a two-month window to request a formal review (Telex, Magyar Közlöny).

The date matters. Budapest has until 31 August to satisfy anti-corruption conditions, known in Brussels as "super milestones", before it can unlock roughly €10 billion in frozen EU recovery funds (Council press release). These are not ordinary promises. They are the legal checkpoints attached to post-pandemic EU money, the kind of conditionality Malta knows well from years of arguing that access to European markets comes with scrutiny of domestic institutions. As To Brief reported, unnamed Commission and Budapest sources have suggested Hungary may be on track. No published legal assessment has yet said so.

What the law actually does

The amendment does not throw open every Orbán-era file. It expands an existing Hungarian review procedure that had been limited to victims and original complainants. Now anyone can file a challenge (Index, K-Monitor). The publication requirement is the practical change: outsiders can only challenge a decision if they know it exists.

The request first returns to the authority that closed the case. If the police or prosecutors refuse to reverse their decision, the file goes to an investigating judge at the Buda Central District Court (UJBTK). The Integrity Authority publishes the decisions but does not rule on them. It can, however, file its own review requests separately (Magyar Közlöny). The offences covered include corruption, abuse of office, budget fraud, public-procurement cartels and related money laundering. The 2026 expansion adds serious property crimes against national assets (Telex, Jogászvilág).

The numbers warn against overselling

The mechanism has produced some results. Integrity Authority records show at least one district prosecutor annulled a termination decision and ordered an investigation to continue. In another case, a prosecution office withdrew its own closure decision (JOG/107/2025, JOG/53/2025).

The wider record is much weaker. K-Monitor, a Hungarian anti-corruption watchdog, reports success rates of 13.8% in 2023, 5% in 2024 and 7% in 2025 (K-Monitor). A separate legal review found 101 cases, with 78 ending in rejection and only 11 in annulment (UJBTK).

Integrity Authority chief Ferenc Pál Bíró told Politico he would reserve judgment on the anti-corruption push until 2027. His warning was blunt: putting large sums through a system with a long corruption history creates new opportunities for abuse (Politico).

The Commission's test is enforcement, not another law

Budapest is presenting the amendment as part of a broader fund-control package before the deadline. The package includes a procurement-exclusion register for convicted companies, EU risk-screening tools for funded programmes, and early steps towards joining the European Public Prosecutor's Office, or EPPO, the EU body that investigates cross-border crimes affecting EU money (Schoenherr, Euronews).

The real test is whether the European Commission, which decides if the milestones have been met, treats the Hungarian changes as legal form or as proven enforcement. An EU Advocate General, a legal adviser to the EU's top court whose opinions are influential but not binding, argued that the Commission should not have released Hungary-related funds until reforms were "in force and effectively applied" (Onvista/Reuters). Dutch parliamentary documents make the same pressure point in fiscal language: recovery of money must remain possible if earlier releases were wrongly justified (Rijksoverheid).

Under the EU recovery-fund regulation (Regulation 2021/241, Article 24), Hungary must submit a formal payment request backed by evidence and an audit summary before the Commission can assess whether the milestones have been fulfilled. That assessment has not been published. The new review route is a real improvement: corruption cases that could once disappear into prosecutorial silence can now be found and challenged. Whether it changes the system depends on prosecutors and judges producing decisions the Commission can verify. The Commission should make that distinction clear when it publishes its assessment.