In recent months, Norway has taken a number of steps to sanction two EU member states – Hungary and Poland – for their repeated violations of human rights and the rule of law. The Norwegian government, which has been led by Conservative Party Erna Solberg since 2013, has suspended the disbursement of millions of euros in grants, causing far more significant and far-reaching effects than those produced so far by European Union initiatives, apparently not as effective.
Norway is not a member of the European Union, but is part of the single market thanks to the agreement on the European Economic Area (EEA, which includes the countries of the Union, Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway), which has among its objectives that of reduce economic disparities across the EEA. Through the grant system of the EEA and Norway, the Norwegian government gives large sums of money to the fifteen economically weakest member countries of the Union, including Hungary and Poland. In recent years, however, the Norwegian government has become increasingly demanding regarding the standards required on human rights and the rule of law to access the funds provided: “at times it has even gone beyond the European Union itself”, he wrote Politico.
In 2014, for example, Norway decided to suspend all direct subsidies to Hungary – € 214 million – for the next seven years, after the government of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán attempted to use the money in violation of established rules. from the grant system. In February this year, it froze the disbursement of 65 million euros that should have financed a project related to Polish courts and prisons, due to the increasingly marked loss of independence of the judiciary in Poland, and the consequent erosion of the rule of law. In addition, in September, Norway excluded from a 100 million euro program the Polish cities that last year had banned “the LGBT ideology”, as the local authorities had defined it.
– Read also: In Poland, the rainbow flag has become the symbol of the opposition
Norway’s particular attention to respect for human rights and the rule of law, and the speed of its sanctioning action, wrote Politico, has highlighted even more the weakness of the European Union, which in recent years has shown great difficulty in taking equally effective measures. Marlene Wind, a political scientist at the University of Copenhagen, said: “It is quite ironic that there is a country outside the European Union that is able to face much more decisively what is happening in Hungary and Poland than the Union. European itself “.
In recent years the European Union has tried to influence the decisions of Hungary and Poland, now considered semi-authoritarian countries, by launching infringement procedures on individual measures or positions – for example the inhumane treatment of migrants in Hungary, or political appointments of judges in Poland -, without however being able to influence the decisions of the respective governments too much.
– Read also: When the money from Europe arrives
Something seemed to change with the rules for the distribution of aid provided by the Recovery Fund, the main European tool for stimulating the economy after the coronavirus pandemic.
Last July, the countries of the Union began discussing the opportunity to link aid to respect for human rights and the rule of law; the difficulty in finding any kind of agreement between the states of the North and the states of Southern Europe had however prompted the negotiators to postpone the question. At the end of September, the German government, which holds the rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union, He said to have received a mandate to introduce a mechanism linking access to European funds to respect for the rule of law: the announcement was seen as a first step to allow the European institutions to obtain an effective tool for lobbying governments of the countries of the East, but in any case a step that is too little ambitious, which could – again – lead to nothing concrete.
–
