Hegedus, Dora Author aut (orcid)0000-0002-4350-3228 Text xx# 2023 Verfassungsblog 2023-12-21 eng

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The Commission’s decision to release a significant amount of EU money is a testament to some serious pitfalls in the mechanism, which governs the unblocking of frozen EU funds. To recall, Hungary’s endowments are blocked via two different channels, based on two different conditionality criteria, which have some overlapping points. Both prescribe reforms to preserve the independence of the judiciary, which according to the Commission’s justification has been successfully accomplished by Hungary.  The Commission has, however, never published a detailed plan that would attach a specific amount to be released to every sufficiently satisfied conditionality criterion. In this blog post, I showcase that the overlap between the two conditionality mechanisms and the absence of a robust ex-ante blueprint for releasing frozen funds make the unblocking process highly obscure. This lack of transparency both decreases the efficiency and robustness of conditionality, and increases the tendency for inter-institutional conflicts. CC BY-SA 4.0 Hegedus, Dora cohesion funds conditionality conditionality mechanism EU Council EU funds EU rule of law framework Hungary 342 https://verfassungsblog.de/same-same-but-different/ 2366-7044 Max Steinbeis Verfassungsblog gGmbH 10.59704/90a6c60ebafa2c61 231221 10.59704/90a6c60ebafa2c61 Converted from MARCXML to MODS version 3.7 using MARC21slim2MODS3-7.xsl (Revision 1.140 20200717)