Hungary widens corruption appeals before €10bn deadline

Hungary changed its criminal procedure law on 26 August to let anyone challenge decisions that shut down or refused corruption investigations. Under the amended rules, police and prosecutors must send anonymised versions of those decisions to the Integrity Authority (the country's anti-corruption watchdog), which publishes them online. Any person or organisation then has two months to file a formal review request (Telex, Magyar Közlöny).

The timing is not accidental. Budapest faces a 31 August deadline to satisfy anti-corruption conditions, known as "super milestones," that gate access to roughly €10 billion in frozen EU recovery funds (Council press release). As To Brief reported, unnamed Commission and Budapest sources have signalled Hungary may be on track. No published legal assessment has confirmed it.

What the law actually does

The law does not reopen every Orbán-era case. It widens an existing Hungarian review procedure that previously limited challenges to victims and original complainants. Now anyone can file (Index, K-Monitor). The decisions themselves must be published so outsiders can find them, which removes the first barrier: you cannot challenge what you cannot see.

The request goes back to whoever closed the case. If police or prosecutors refuse to reverse themselves, the file moves to an investigating judge at the Buda Central District Court (UJBTK). The Integrity Authority publishes but does not decide; it can also file its own review requests separately (Magyar Közlöny). The covered offences include corruption, abuse of office, budget fraud, public-procurement cartels and related money laundering, with the 2026 expansion adding serious property crimes against national assets (Telex, Jogászvilág).

The numbers warn against overselling

The route has produced results. Integrity Authority records show at least one district prosecutor annulled a termination and ordered an investigation to continue; in another, a prosecution withdrew its own closure decision (JOG/107/2025, JOG/53/2025). But the aggregate picture is thin. 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, of which 78 ended in rejection and only 11 in annulment (UJBTK).

Integrity Authority chief Ferenc Pál Bíró told Politico he would withhold judgment on the anti-corruption drive until 2027, warning that pouring large sums into a system with a long corruption history creates fresh abuse risks (Politico).

The Commission's test is enforcement, not another law

Budapest is bundling this amendment with a wider package of fund-control promises before the deadline: a procurement-exclusion register for convicted companies, EU risk-screening tools for funded programmes, and early steps toward joining the European Public Prosecutor's Office (EPPO, the EU's cross-border prosecution body) (Schoenherr, Euronews).

The question now is whether the European Commission, which decides if milestones are met, judges Hungary on legal form or proven enforcement. An EU Advocate General (a legal adviser to the EU's top court, whose opinions carry weight but are 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 stress that recovery of money must remain possible if earlier releases turn out to have been wrongly justified (Rijksoverheid).

Under the EU's recovery-fund rules (Regulation 2021/241, Article 24), Hungary must file a formal payment request backed by evidence and an audit summary before the Commission can assess milestone fulfilment. That assessment has not been published. The review route is a genuine improvement: corruption cases that once vanished into prosecutorial silence can now be found and challenged. Whether it changes outcomes at scale depends on prosecutors and judges producing decisions the Commission can verify, not just legislation that satisfies a deadline. The Commission owes that distinction when it publishes its assessment.