Hungary’s laws creating transparency in the use of public funds will be moved from the Civil Code to be included in cardinal laws but will not be eliminated, the Ministry of Public Administration and Justice told MTI on Tuesday in a statement.
The ministry responded to Andras Schiffer, a lawmaker of the small opposition LMP party, who told a press conference on Monday that the government had “surreptitiously removed” the law on public funds, also known as the “glass pockets law” from its proposal for the new Civil Code. He said that as a result from 2013 on it will be impossible to track public spending.
The ministry statement said that the law had been lifted without any changes from the Civil Code as “it does not belong there”. However it will be included in the cardinal law on Informational Self-Determination and Freedom of Information, which requires a two-thirds parliamentary majority to amend, the statement added. It said in 2003 the original transparency law was only incuded in the Civil Code for political reasons, namely that it lacked two-thirds majority support in parliament.
