They are the ones who hit our country with an unprecedented penalty of forty million per migrant. Written by Miklós Szánthó.
A president, a general counsel and five judges - all of them are members of the open society network, and they are behind the infamous EU court decision that imposed a general penalty of eighty billion forints (and two hundred million forints per day) on Hungary because our country does not admit illegal migrants. They are the "gray officials" whose decisions affect the lives of all of us, yet we don't know much about them.
However, the Luxembourg board is the real EU deep state: it is less visible than the committee or the EP, but it is an all the more important and cunning player in EU decision-making. If empire-building slows down or stops, it is this court that pushes it back into action - whether it's federalism, gender, or migration.
The Belgian Koen Lenaerts, the president of the court that actually conducts stealth legislation, threatened Hungary with expulsion (!) from the EU in the migration case that served as a precursor to the current decision; and his colleague at the General Counsel, the Estonian Priit Pikamäe, regularly presents motions condemning our country - a possible explanation for this could be his strong network of left-liberal connections.
And the five judges: the French Bonichot, the Cypriot Lycourgos, the Croatian Rodin, the Italian Rossi and, last but not least, the Romanian Spineanu-Matei?
Well, let's put it this way: György Soros's theory of an open society convinced them too that border protection is an unnecessary luxury of "nation states on the dustbin of history" anyway.
Commission. Parliament. Advice. Every day, we are bombarded with these words from the media when it comes to the European Union. After the EP elections, at the beginning of the Hungarian presidency of the council, a few months before the formation of the next committee, this is not so surprising. Especially not if we look at the number of challenges facing the EU and their weight.
The tasks of the above three EU institutions and their role in legislation and decision-making are not easy to understand even for the initiated. However, their operation is well visualized, the leaders and representatives of the institutions personify them: we see the sequences of them as they come and go in Brussels, make statements, and vote.
However, there is a lesser-known pillar of the EU's institutional system, but in many respects more influential than the three institutions:
the Court of Justice of the European Union, which quietly but consistently builds the ever closer union.
The invisible legion of judges?
Its members are not in the public eye, and the voters do not have to account for their decisions, which have a great impact on the daily lives of citizens: their legitimacy is indirect and their responsibility is unclear.
The majority of them have already visited one of the EU institutions (rather, all of them) before they landed in the judge's seat as a result of the so-called revolving door effect - as it "happened" to the judges who punished Hungary.
They are the "nobles" of the legal aristocracy, they are the high-ranking functionaries of the European deep state. They are invisible. They are untouchable. They are irreplaceable.
Their mission has been clear for decades: if the European Union integration process stalls, if voters say no to the European constitution or the United States of Europe, then the Court of Justice of the EU will come and move the stalled process forward.
The political goal of the court, disguised as professional, is to become the engine of federalization: if ordinary legislation does not work for other bodies, the board will "solve" it with stealth legislation disguised as law enforcement.
It is a small part of the genre of scientific knowledge dissemination, but it is a fact: the much-cited principle of the primacy of EU law - that is, if EU law and member state law conflict, the EU law is "right" - was developed by the court, it was never included in the EU treaties.
And although the EU judges who "discover" such and similar progressive principles on a daily basis are unknown, they are predictable from one point of view: whether it is about migration, gender issues, the rule of law or federalism, they consistently represent and enforce the political agenda of an open society.
Of course, there are always one or two deviants, they get the big deal. But you can't make mistakes in political matters. As Béla Pokol, who regularly discusses the supremacy of the judicial elite, the jurisprudence, says:
"When an important decision has to be made, they presumably always make sure that the majority in the judicial council is 'our dog's puppy' - so there is no independence in important matters".
Not only politically, but also legally, they can do pretty much anything - since no one holds them accountable, there is no superior body, there is no appeal forum. After all, they exercise enormous power over us.
The human rights fundamentalist repository of the open society network, the Helsinki Commission, installed in Hungary, also puts it this way: "Although many people are not aware of it, the judgments of the Court of Justice of the European Union have a direct impact on the lives of hundreds of millions of EU citizens, that is, on our lives as well."
One of their most recent judgments is well-known, and the direct impact is not left behind: on June 13, Hungary was fined almost eighty billion forints for "violation of refugee rights" (that is, border protection), and Hungary was also ordered to pay an additional two hundred million forints every single day for because
Hungary has not fully fulfilled its obligation to provide access to the asylum procedure.
(Given the number of illegal border crossing attempts this year, this comes out to roughly forty million forints per migrant!)
And yes: we tend to believe that the judgment was made by a faceless bureaucratic body hidden in offices, an institution in the Babel of Brussels, in which almost no people work, but some ethereal beings, already far elevated from the ordinary days of Pislicsáre.
The drawn ivory tower
The reality, however, is that EU judges are not the professionals of the "army of faceless excellence", they are not the best and the wisest among us, but
The soldiers of György Soros' "invisible legion" who have now fully occupied the court's ivory tower and punish states where conservative, sovereignist or even anti-migration governments work to their heart's content.
Let's see the members and leaders of the European Court of Justice who imposed this unprecedented punishment on Hungary! First of all, it is worth highlighting Koen Lenaerts, the president of the court, for two reasons: on the one hand, he appoints the judges acting in individual cases - who, according to Pokol,
he knows exactly the political preferences and biases in each judicial council
-, on the other hand, his anti-Hungarian attitude can almost be compared to that of his fellow countryman, Guy Verhofstadt: regarding the former transit zone case, he said, "if you really dispute the court's decision, it means the end of your membership".
The other main columnist is the Estonian Priit Pikamäe, the chief counsel: in practice, they write and present the motions on which the decisions are based - from which the judges deviate in the rarest of cases during decision-making (see also: "But Comrade Virág, this is the verdict!") . This is what happened now. By the way, Pikamäe was previously the head of the Estonian Supreme Court: his mentor for this position,
It was nominated by the country's then "social democratic" president, Toomas Hendrik Ilves, who is a close friend of György Soros and was also a guest at his wedding
- but the network of open society is not far from the mentored judge, as the Firewall Group highlighted earlier. One of the biggest Estonian judicial scandals is connected to the general counsel - who previously presented several other motions condemning Hungary -: the highest court body sanctioned the marriage of a Swedish homosexual couple in Estonia despite the fact that same-sex marriage was not included in the Estonian laws in force. .
However, Pikamäe is not the only one who is upset that Hungary was punished by the Union in an unprecedented way for the anti-immigration policy supported by the Hungarians.
The judicial council was headed by Cypriot Constantinos Lycourgos, whose manager's smile hides a battle-hardened serial predator. While Lycourgos swapped government assignments in Cyprus for judicial work in Luxembourg, he never strayed far from the network: even as an EU judge, he noted a study published by Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, a foundation of the German social democrats, which also cooperates with the Open Society Foundations (OSF), which details how " can access" environmental NGOs to court decision-making.
Of course, Lycourgos is a long-time devotee of the "constitutional dialogue" about the EU's rule of law (in the Brussels neo-speak, this means indoctrination):
In Cyprus, he mentored a group of students dealing with such matters, held regular lectures on Article 7 procedures - and last but not least, he participated in the making of numerous migration decisions condemning Hungary in recent years, from transit zones to Stop, Soros! to a package of laws.
Another member of the council acting in the current case is the French Jean-Claude Bonichot, who not only condemned Hungary last year - together with his colleagues discussed in this article - in a similar case about "making international protection unavailable", but was also a part of the 2017 migration also a quota lawsuit.
Speaking about his federalist ideas in numerous interviews, Bonichot also recently proudly stated that the Court of Justice of the European Union is the most powerful body of its kind in the world.
Perhaps due to this arrogance, he expressed his indignation that some member states dare to question the primacy of EU law, which was meticulously developed by the court itself, calling it an "effective mechanism" that the body can impose a heavy financial burden on "reluctant" countries.
The Italian Lucia Serena Rossi, after working both in the EP and the committee, was an EU political advisor to the left-wing Matteo Renzi government between 2014 and 2017, and in 2018 she was also nominated as an EU judge by the left-wing prime minister.
Rossi is a real "watchdog": already in a 2015 article, he specifically criticized the personality of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and emphasized that because of him "you have to be vigilant" regarding the rule of law.
He spoke specifically in favor of increasing the powers of the committee and - like Lenaerts and many left-wing MEPs - raised the issue of the exclusion of "non-conforming" member states.
Konyakosmeggy at the top of the sponge cake: On December 6, 2021, he gave a lecture entitled Values, rights and principles in EU law at György Soros' activist training school, CEU.
The Croatian judge Sinisa Rodin graduated from the University of Michigan, which is also supported by OSF, in 1992. Between 2001 and 2002, she was a guest researcher at Harvard with the Fulbright program, which also cooperates many times with OSF, and in 2012 she became a visiting professor at the American Cornell Law School. , to which the Soros donated a total of more than 250,000 dollars between 2016 and 2021.
Rodin was also grateful for the care: he also went to perform at the CEU.
Last but not least: the fifth member of the council that is (also) condemning Hungary is the Romanian Octavia Spineanu-Matei, whose father was a judge in Nicolae Ceausescu's party state. His daughter was nominated to the Court of Justice of the European Union by former Minister of Justice Raluca Alexandra Pruna, former CEU student, founder and later president of the branch organization of Transparency International in Romania - perhaps also because Spineanu-Matei was a committed supporter of sensitizing judges as head of the judicial training institute.
And conspiratorial reality
And behold a miracle, the above life paths lead directly to the making of judgments favorable to an open society.
Named judges, sometimes together or separately, have been crafting migration judgments condemning Hungary and others for many years.
Without claiming to be exhaustive: as we indicated above, last year, for example, the same council established a violation of the law because our country made it possible to submit asylum applications at foreign embassies - or previously because of the transit zone procedure.
But Bonichot and Rodin also took part in the judgment in which the Luxembourg panel rejected the Hungarian and Slovak claim against the quota system. Lycourgos and Bonichot also fought on another topic: in addition to condemning our country for daring to punish NGO assistance for illegal border crossings, they forced
Bulgaria to recognize the paternity of a same-sex couple, even though Bulgarian law does not allow it.
So everything comes together:
– an ideology that proclaims itself to be open, but actually aims at a very closed imperial structure;
– a court that fits well into the structure and desires unlimited power;
political activist judges who move within the framework of ideology, legislate instead of applying the law - and a network that plans to build the United States of Europe, without nations, states or borders, but with a "dynamically" interpreted right of asylum, "accessible" international protection and with many, many migrants.
No, I don't believe in conspiracy theories. But I can see the conspiracy exercise a lot.
The author is the Director General of the Center for Fundamental Rights
Cover image: Miklós Szánthó
Source: Mandiner
