European Parliament rejects Hungary's request to lift MEP Magyar, Salis and Dobrev's immunities

The European Parliament rejected the Hungarian government's request to lift the immunities of MEPs Péter Magyar, Ilaria Salis and Klára Dobrev in a tense vote on Tuesday.

The Hungarian authorities requested that their immunity be lifted as part of legal actions against the MEPs.

Parliament's lawmakers rejected the requests of Hungarian authorities to waive the immunity of Hungary’s opposition leader Péter Magyar, who currently leads Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in opinion polls ahead of next year’s elections in Hungary.

The Parliament's legal committee JURI recommended this step prior to the vote, highlighting doubts that Magyar could have a fair trial in Hungary. The lawmakers voted by a show of hands to reject Hungary’s request as it sought legal proceedings against Magyar, a member of the EPP political group.

Hungary demanded that Magyar’s immunity be lifted to face prosecution back home in three legal cases.

The first one was related to allegations that Magyar threw a man's phone into the Danube River after an argument in a Budapest nightclub, where he was being filmed.

The other two cases are related to alleged defamation cases initiated by a former member of the Hungarian parliament, György Simonka, and by the far-right Our Homeland Movement.

Magyar claimed that the cases were politically motivated against him as Magyar’s Respect and Freedom or Tisza party is ahead of Orbán's Fidesz in opinion polls ahead of next year's parliamentary election in Hungary.

Orbán criticised the European Parliament vote on Tuesday, saying that Brussels can now use Magyar's immunity to ask for favours from a man who behaves "like a Trojan horse of Ukraine in the EU".

"Tisza will fight next year’s election with a blackmailed man from Brussels", Orbán wrote on Facebook.

In a separate case, socialist MEP Klára Dobrev from Hungary also retained her immunity as a result of the plenary vote. She was subject to a defamation case in Hungary.

Ilaria Salis saved by one vote

If Magyar and Dobrev's cases were a straightforward affair for the European Parliament, the plenary’s vote over MEP Ilaria Salis went to the wire with just one vote against Budapest's request to lift the immunity of the Italian lawmaker from The Left political group.

Hungary was seeking Salis’ prosecution in a case of alleged assault against two far-right militants.

In a secret ballot, 306 MEPs voted in favour of defending Salis’ immunity versus 305 MEPs against in an unusually tense vote that displayed deep divisions among conservatives in the European Parliament.

The left side of the hemicycle burst into applause after European Parliament President Roberta Metsola announced the result. 

Reacting to the vote, Orbán called Salis "a member of a terrorist group protected by Brussels," in a post on X.

As the vote was held by secret ballot, it is not known which MEPs voted in favour of upholding Salis' immunity and who was against it.

However, the vote count revealed that MEPs from right-wing political groups, such as the European People's Party (EPP), the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) and Patriots for Europe (PfE) broke ranks and defended Salis' immunity, despite their groups' typically conservative political positions.

The show of hands turned even more dramatic after Czech MEP Tomáš Zdechovský (EPP) asked the vote to be repeated after he claimed that the system used for voting “was not working” for one of his colleagues. Parliament President Metsola rejected the request, saying that “the vote stands”.

After the vote, Salis told journalists that she wanted her case to be investigated in Italy as, according to her, “in Hungary no fair trials can be celebrated against the anti-fascists nor against any political opponents”.

Salis was arrested in Budapest in February 2023 on the sidelines of a demonstration protesting against a neo-Nazi gathering in Europe.

At the time, Salis was a teacher and a human rights activist. She spent more than 15 months in pre-trial detention in Hungary, claiming to have suffered harsh conditions and human rights violations. Hungary denied her claims.

Her arrest quickly spiralled into a political case. The footage of her being escorted to trial in chains and her denunciations of mistreatment in Hungarian prisons sparked outrage in Italy, leading the government to summon Hungary's ambassador. At the same time, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni raised the issue with Orbán.

“I promise that fair treatment will be provided, that all rights will be guaranteed”, Orbán then told Meloni.

"I have made it clear that in the Hungarian system prosecutors do not belong to the government, but to the parliament, so I cannot influence them at all," he said.

Salis was then elected to the European Parliament in June 2024 with the Alliance Greens-Left (AVS) party, joining The Left group and regaining her freedom through parliamentary immunity.

Hungarian law allows MEPs to take their seats upon election, meaning Salis was released from prison to go to Brussels. On the other hand, her election to the European institution did not clear her of the charges, nor did it stop the trial, which meant Budapest could request that the European Parliament lift Salis' immunity to conclude the proceedings.

However, the rapporteur of her case in the Parliament, Spanish MEP Adrián Vázquez Lázara (EPP), stated that defending her immunity has been a mistake and that the Hungarian judiciary could win a case in the European Court of Justice if it launches a legal challenge.