Hungary, Poland Fight EU In Court Over Budget Conditions

Luxembourg, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 11th Oct, 2021 ) :Hungary and Poland stepped into an EU court on Monday in an attempt to strip Brussels of new powers that could see the right-wing governments denied billions of Euros in cash from the bloc.

The hearing was the latest skirmish in a multi-front legal war between the countries and the bloc's institutions that reached a boiling point last week when Poland's top court ruled that EU law was unconstitutional.

At the EU's top court in Luxembourg, the two governments are fighting a landmark decision made last year when northern member states led by the Netherlands insisted that EU payouts be withheld if bloc norms on corruption and the independence of courts were endangered.

Warsaw and Budapest were the intended targets of this new mechanism because of their recurrent disputes with the EU over the rule-of-law -- and they went to the EU's highest court in March to have it annulled.

"The contested regulation infringes the treaties and must be annulled in its entirety," Poland's lawyer Sylwia Zyrek told a panel of judges on Monday.

Miklos Zoltan Feher, who pleaded for Hungary, said the mechanism was unnecessary given that the "existing legal framework is able to protect the Union's budget".

The court's decision is not expected for months, but EU member states had agreed to suspend the mechanism as long as the court had hold of the question.

This was opposed by the European Parliament, where a majority of MEPs has threatened to sue the European Commission, the EU executive's arm, if it continues to drag its feet.

Feeling the pressure, EU officials have indicated that the commission could launch the mechanism as early as next month.

In the meantime, the commission has blocked the national recovery plans submitted by Poland and Hungary over failures to provide better guarantees on rule-of-law issues in how they spend the money.

Those plans are part of the EU's 800-billion-euro pandemic recovery package, with Poland hoping for 24 billion euros in subsidies and Hungary wanting 7.2 billion euros.

The new mechanism was the final condition for the richer member states to accept the historic recovery deal that took EU leaders four days to negotiate in July 2020.

The hearings in Luxembourg began a few days after a ruling by Poland's highest court - mostly appointees of the conservative nationalist party in power - said that the country's constitution held greater weight than some EU laws.