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The EU Is Turning Against NGOs, Too

Europe criticizes other countries for cracking down on civil society—and is on the verge of doing the same.

By Anchal Vohra, a columnist at Foreign Policy.

President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen attends a plenary session at the European Parliament in Brussels on March 29, 2023.

March 29, 2023, 3:57 PM

Thousands gathered on the streets of Georgian capital Tbilisi last month to protest a draft law calling for nonprofit human rights organizations and media outlets to register as agents of foreign influence if they received more than 20 percent of their funding from abroad. The protests resonated in Brussels, the seat of the European Union. The European External Action Service (EEAS) promptly warned the Georgian government that such a law would be “incompatible” with EU values and standards and go “against Georgia’s stated objective of joining the European Union.”

The proposed legislation on “transparency of foreign influence” raised serious concerns, according to the EEAS statement, which emphasized that Georgia would have to undertake reforms to ensure freedom of the press and civil society if it wanted to ever become a part of the EU.

Yet, at the same time as Europe was chastising Georgia, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Brussels were reading about the EU’s plans for similar legislation, which has also been compared to the U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act. The European Union has already sent a questionnaire to Brussels-based NGOs inquiring about their source of funds. “Does your organisation receive funding, or other forms of financial contributions from outside the EU?” asked an “impact assessment form” seen by Foreign Policy.

The law, which is still at a preliminary stage, is part of a package of legislation that European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has described as necessary to defend democracy. The EU bureaucracy has been consulting with NGOs on the law’s particulars. Some have already been invited to talks with Vera Jourova, vice president of the commission, who is in charge of the impending law.

Nick Aiossa, head of policy and advocacy at Transparency International, was among those who attended a consultation. “[The commission is] not saying the law is only about NGOs but historically such legislations are used by authoritarians against the civil society,” he told Foreign Policy at a cafe in the shadow of the commission building in Brussels.

“My concern is that it will be abused by far-right parties, some of whom are already in power,” Aiossa said. “Orban in Hungary, Meloni in Italy; I mean, they are not fans of NGOs; and the former has already demonstrated the willingness to attack NGOs through the passage of domestic laws.”

The EU has claimed moral authority around the world for maintaining an open civil society while reprimanding other nations for curbing dissent. Now, as it prepares a law that seeks to regulate NGOs, apparently along with other interest groups, activists say it is threatening to indulge in flagrant hypocrisy. They say authoritarians elsewhere in the world may soon cite Europe’s law while targeting their own human-rights organizations. They also say the EU’s process for drafting the law could be unduly influenced by Europe’s right-wing parties, which for years have incited anti-NGO prejudices to further their own political and economic agenda.

“It is essential that NGOs are not targeted in an unjustified way,” Maria Nyman, secretary-general of Caritas Europa, told Foreign Policy via an email. “We have been concerned about initiatives in these past years, and amplified again recently, to disproportionately increase the administrative burden of NGOs compared to other EU funding beneficiaries.”

The EU’s efforts to check foreign influence on independent policymaking received a dose of urgency when a bribery scandal rocked the Belgian capital early last December. Activists say that the conservative European People’s Party (EPP), the biggest political group in the European Parliament, has deliberately made NGOs the face of the bribery scandal dubbed Qatargate and is using the involvement of an NGO called Fight Impunity to besmirch the reputation of all others.

Often dismissed as sleepy and dull, Brussels is home to all kinds of entities trying to influence decision-making in the 27-member bloc. On Dec. 9, 2022, Belgian police swept through nearly two dozen offices and homes and found 1.5 million euros in cash, which Qatar allegedly gave as bribes to EU lawmakers to influence policy in its favor.

Eva Kaili, a vice president of the European Parliament, was arrested along with six other suspects after her father was found with a suitcase containing 600,000 euros while leaving the Sofitel hotel in the Belgian capital. Former member of parliament Antonio Panzeri, the kingpin of the scandal, was also found with a large sum and put behind bars.

In 2019, Panzeri attended a conference in Qatar’s capital Doha centered around the theme “Fighting Impunity.” He later opened an NGO called Fight Impunity—which is now found in the mix in the bribery scandal. Kaili and Panzeri were both leaders of the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats (S&D) group in the European Parliament; Francesco Giorgi, Kaili’s partner, earlier worked with Panzeri at the now-disgraced NGO.

Several activists in Brussels told Foreign Policy that the NGO sector has deliberately been made the focus of a scandal that truly centered around corrupt politicians and a gas-rich nation. They said the EPP’s aim was to discredit NGOs, weaken their often anti-corporate grass-roots movements to benefit its pro-industry agenda, and exploit the allegations of bribery against S&D leaders, their political and ideological opponents, with an eye on the upcoming EU elections.

Pedro López de Pablo, head of press and communications for EPP, told Foreign Policy the group just wanted “NGO financing to be made transparent.”

“NGOs are at the heart of the scandal the S&D is embroiled in,” the EPP tweeted on Dec. 16 last year. “We at the EPP have called for a comprehensive review of the current rules on NGOs as a minimum expression of accountability.”

Monika Hohlmeier, an EPP member of European parliament, has said the EPP is “not against organizations that play by the rules and do extremely useful, valuable work.” Instead, it is fighting against those that are “not transparent, with shady financing and participating in illegal activities.”

But NGOs claim they are already self-regulating. Representatives from at least three leading NGOs with whom Foreign Policy spoke said they were willingly releasing the sources of their funds in a transparency register and have repeatedly suggested the register is made mandatory for all interest representatives, including NGOs, lobbyists, think tanks, consultancies, and others.

“[The transparency register] is only mandatory if we want a badge needed to enter the parliament,” said Hans van Scharen, researcher and campaigner at Corporate Europe Observatory. “But it should be.”

Fight Impunity, for instance, was not on the transparency register.

“Right-wing groups started a baseless crusade against NGOs as a category for something one unregistered group allegedly did,” Claudio Francavilla, senior EU advocate at Human Rights Watch (HRW) wrote in an email..

“All members of the Human Rights and Democracy Network (HRDN), a network of about 60 NGOs present in Brussels, including HRW, are required by the network’s statute to be registered in the Transparency Register and to have their financial records publicly available.”

If required to register, however, smaller NGOs that receive EU funding may risk losing donors who prefer to stay anonymous for various non-corrupt reasons.

EPP’s hostility toward NGOs, activists said, was first on display in 2017, when Markus Pieper, a German EPP parliamentarian, argued that the EU should only fund NGOs that are in line with the EU’s “strategic commercial and security-policy objectives.” Pieper took up the position after negotiations on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (T-TIP) between the EU and United States collapsed.

“There was huge mobilization in civil society against T-TIP and we won,” Van Scharen said. “Other factors weighed in, but politicians like Markus really hated what we did. EPP really don’t like if there is a pushback against their pro-industry, free trade, and market liberalization agenda.”

Transparency International’s Aiossa noted that Pieper’s draft was even criticized by some in the EPP at the time. “But his messaging picked up years later when they saw an electoral opportunity in the run up to elections,” he said. “They want to court the conservatives for their votes. Who doesn’t want to roll out an anti-NGO narrative ahead of elections?”