Advocate General (AG) Tamara Ćapeta has advised the Court of Justice to annul the European Commission’s 2023 decision to lift a suspension and allow the disbursement of roughly 10.2bn Euros in EU funds to Hungary, siding with the European Parliament in Case C-225/24, Parliament v Commission.
What changes if the Court follows the AG?
The AG treats the Commission’s assessment of enabling conditions under the Common Provisions Regulation as a strict, reviewable compliance check, not a flexible, political judgment call. In her view, reforms tied to Charter-related judicial-independence requirements must be in force and demonstrate effectiveness before the Commission can lift a suspension, and the reasoning must show how that conclusion was reached.
That framing matters beyond Hungary. It would raise the evidentiary and transparency bar for future unfreezing decisions, and it would strengthen the Parliament’s ability to use litigation as an accountability lever when it suspects political deal-making around funds. If the Commission’s decision is annulled, the practical remedy to be discussed is not clawing back cash from Hungary, but offsetting it via future allocations.
At the core is a question of budget enforcement versus political discretion. The Parliament argues the Commission prematurely concluded that Hungary had met enabling conditions linked to rule-of-law and judicial-independence reforms, and that the decision lacked adequate reasoning. The AG’s opinion largely supports this line. EU funds should not be paid out until the required reforms are in force and effectively applied, and the Commission must substantively assess whether the conditions are genuinely met before lifting a suspension.
Politically, the opinion strengthens Parliament’s hand in an unusually direct institutional confrontation: it frames budget conditionality not as a flexible bargaining chip, but as a legally constrained assessment. That matters because critics, including MEPs, have long suspected the timing of the unfreezing decision was entangled with wider political trade-offs involving Hungary.
Institutionally, the stakes extend beyond Hungary. If the Court follows the AG, it would tighten judicial control over how the Commission justifies rule-of-law related disbursements, effectively nudging EU budget governance toward a more reviewable, evidence-heavy model of accountability, with the CJEU acting as a backstop when political oversight fails.
- https://curia.europa.eu/site/upload/docs/application/pdf/2026-02/cp260015en.pdf
- https://commission.europa.eu/funding-tenders/find-funding/funding-management-mode/common-provisions-regulation_en
- https://infocuria.curia.europa.eu/tabs/document?source=document&text=&docid=285967&pageIndex=0&doclang=EN&mode=lst&dir=&occ=first&part=1&cid=1072080
- https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2026/02/12/eu-court-challenges-controversial-102bn-payment-to-hungary
