Ilaria Salis denounces Hungary’s “doggedness”: “They want to prevent me from serving as an MEP”

Brussels – The back-and-forth between Budapest and Ilaria Salis continues. The day after the request of lifting her parliamentary immunity by Hungarian judges, the AVD MEP convened a press conference to tell her side of the story and denounce the savage smear campaign put on by Viktor Orbán’s government, his Fidesz party and several national parties of the Patriots’ Group in the European Parliament to “prevent her from carrying out her mandate.”

Salis first reiterated her innocence: “There is no evidence against me, and I was not recognized among the attackers by either the victims or the witnesses,” stressed the 39-year-old activist, who on Feb. 11, 2023, was arrested in Budapest, where she was to attend an anti-fascist demonstration against Honor Day, a neo-Nazi rally “supported and financed” by the Hungarian government. Salis is accused of violently beating some Hungarian far-right militants: “arbitrary accusations,” denounced the MEP, who was later detained in prison in Budapest for 15 months in “inhuman and degrading conditions.”

Hungarian police allegedly “subjected her to repeated interrogations aimed at extorting confessions.” Salis’ affair made headlines in late January when she was led before the judge on a leash and chained hand and foot. The wave of outrage unleashed by those images convinced the Green and Left Alliance to nominate Ilaria Salis as a candidate in the June European elections, in which she was elected with 178,000 preferences, thus allowing her to enjoy parliamentary immunity and leave prison in Budapest, where she faces a sentence of up to 24 years.

After her release from prison and arrival in Brussels, Salis became the target of a heavy smear campaign. During the first plenary session in July, an Austrian deputy from the Patriots group called for “preventing weapons from being brought into the parliament,” accusing Salis of “willingly beating people with a hammer.” The same Orbán, first from the stage in Pontida together with Matteo Salvini and then in the hemicycle in Strasbourg—in response to a harsh invective by Salis herself—blamed the defendant for “beating up peaceful people on the streets of Budapest with iron bars.” Yesterday, after the announcement of the request for waiver of immunity, Magyar government spokesman Zoltan Kovacs called her a “common thug.”

According to Salis, all this is “to prevent me from being able to carry out the mandate” as an MEP. “The first instance of the trial has not even ended, and I have already been condemned by the Hungarian government, Fidesz and others of the Patriots,” the Italian MEP stressed, wondering, “How can judges examine with the necessary objectivity and serenity a defendant who is portrayed as a thug, as a public enemy, as a “terrorist”, by political power.”

Ilaria Salis at the EU Parliament

Salis, whose fate is now in the hands of fellow MEPs, hoped that the European Parliament “will not give in to the bullying of an authoritarian government.” Once the EU Parliament’s legal committee considers the request for revocation, the hemicycle’s vote will make the difference. Salis will likely be able to count on the support of her own political group (The Left), Social Democrats, Greens and Liberals, while the three far-right groups—European Conservatives and Reformists, Patriots for Europe and Europe of Sovereign Nations—are unlikely to support her. At the vote count, the deciding factor will be the 188 MEPs of the European People’s Party and the 76 from Italian party delegations. On the support of her compatriots and the need to secure that of the European centre-right, Salis did not mince her words, returning reporters’ questions to the sender.

Parliamentary immunity, how much Ilaria Salis risks

From a purely legal point of view, the Italian MEP is at great risk. Because the operative part of the parliamentary immunity protects Parliament and its members from “criminal proceedings relating to activities carried out in the exercise of the parliamentary mandate and which cannot be separated from that mandate.” That is not quite the case for Salis, although the rules governing the waiver of immunity allow for an exception: “Where the proceedings do not relate to opinions expressed or votes cast in the exercise of parliamentary functions, immunity should be waived unless it appears that the intention behind the prosecution is to damage the political activity of a Member of Parliament and consequently the independence of Parliament.”

The EU Parliament Legal Affairs Committee to which Budapest’s request was referred does not examine whether or not the MEP is guilty, nor does it comment on the relevance of the judicial process. It is not required to go into the merits of alleged deficiencies in national judicial systems, which cannot be used to justify a decision not to waive an MEP’s immunity.

However, the case of Ilaria Salis is part of the broader political clash between the pro-European forces in the European Parliament and Viktor Orbán. First and foremost precisely on the rule of law: as Salis herself recalled, Hungary ” has been repeatedly called out and sanctioned by European authorities for violations of the rule of law, concerning, among other things, the independence of the judiciary and human rights,” and since 2018 has been under a procedure for the risk of violating the fundamental values of the Union.