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Euronews
19-06-2025
- Politics
- Euronews
EU Parliament sets up working group to scrutinise EU funding to NGOs
The European Parliament's political leaders agreed on Thursday to form a working group within the Committee on Budgetary Control (CONT) to scrutinise how the European Commission funds non-governmental organisations. The group will include 13 MEPs chaired by German lawmaker Niclas Herbst with two co-rapporteurs, from the centre-right European People's Party and the right wing European Conservatives and Reformists, Parliament sources told Euronews. The decision came after a spat over the financing of environmental NGOs by the European Commission, accused by the German newspaper Welt Am Sonntag of having secretly paid up to €700,000 to promote the bloc's climate policy. The Commission denied that it had signed "secret contracts' and claims it exercises a high degree of transparency in providing funding to NGOs. The right and far-right groups of the European Parliament have been pushing to set up an inquiry committee to clarify the issue, but their request was voted down during the Conference of Presidents (CoP), the weekly meeting of the Parliament's political groups' leaders. Instead, the CoP approved a working group, proposed by the European People's Party (EPP), the largest group in the Parliament, and ultimately backed also by the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) and Patriots for Europe (PfE). All the other groups of the so-called 'pro-european majority' (Socialists, liberals and Greens) were against both the inquiry committee and the working group, but on the latter they were outvoted by the so-called 'Venezuela majority', an alliance in the chamber which sees the EPP cooperating with other right-wing groups. Working groups are ad hoc structures that enable European Parliament's committees to follow up on the implementation of legislation in place, conduct investigations and studies on very specific and time-defined issues. This one has a six-month mandate. According to internal sources of the EPP, a working group was preferred to an inquiry committee as the former is more focused on scrutinising the future behaviour of the Commission, rather than focusing on what went wrong historically. As Israel and Iran continue to exchange fire for the seventh consecutive day, a disinformation war is simultaneously escalating on social platforms. Euronews' fact-checking team, Euroverify, has been analysing several viral videos emerging from Iran and Israel over recent days in order to verify their authenticity. Our team found a significant number of old videos, unrelated to the current conflict, being falsely linked to the ongoing exchange of fire. Many of them have been viewed hundreds of thousands of times and amplified across platforms, sowing confusion and misleading social media users. A clip circulating widely across X, TikTok and Instagram, and seen hundreds of thousands of times, claims to show Iranians dancing as they shelter in tunnels in the capital of Tehran. Some social media users allege they are celebrating Israeli strikes on the city. "Iranians stuck in traffic on their way to northern Iran start singing and dancing inside a tunnel to celebrate Israeli attacks on the Islamic regime," one X user claims. But a reverse image search using still shots from the clip shows that it was originally posted on Instagram as far back as September 2023. Another video claims to show people fighting among themselves while sheltering at a Tel Aviv bunker. One X post with the video has been viewed over 700,000 times. Yet, the footage in fact shows an altercation at a Georgian court, which was first published on X on June 12, two days before Israel launched the first attacks against Iran. On that day, a 21-year-old Georgian protester was sentenced to four years and six months in prison for "hitting police officers with a stick" during demonstrations against the ruling government last November. Georgian media reported that following his sentencing the court building "descended into chaos" with hundreds of supporters, including the Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili, present to lend their support to the accused. Another video purports to show a crowd of Israeli citizens fleeing from a square in Tel Aviv amid Iranian strikes. A reverse image search shows that the scene dates from April this year, when a false security alert triggered a swift evacuation of a square in Tel Aviv during a memorial day event. While the scene does show residents fleeing an Israeli square, it pre-dates the current conflict. Other social media users have shared a video claiming to show an explosion caused by an Iranian strike on Tel Aviv. But the footage is astonishingly 22 years old, and shows a US strike on Iraq in 2003. Similarly, recent footage showing an Israeli airstrike on Houthi targets in Yemen's capital Sanaa has been circulating with false claims that it shows explosions in Israel caused by Iranian attacks.
Euronews
08-04-2025
- Politics
- Euronews
MEPs reject renewed attacks on NGO funding in EU budget review
ADVERTISEMENT The European Parliament's budgetary control committee has provisionally signed off on the EU's 2023 budget, largely voting down attempts by right-wing law makers to include harsh criticism of funding for non-governmental organisations in its final report. As well as rejecting a joint proposal by members of Hungary's ruling Fidesz party and France's Rassemblement National to condemn an 'enormous EU-NGO propaganda complex', the committee rejected a slew of amendments tabled by conservative European People's Party (EPP) lawmaker Monika Hohlmeier. Among them was a call for the EU Court of Auditors (ECA) to conduct a probe specifically into the LIFE Programme, the bloc's funding instrument for environmental projects on the ground, a small portion of which supports campaign groups through operating grants. Last week saw the parliament's environment committee reject a motion calling on the European Commission to halt such funding, after a handful of EPP lawmakers broke with the party line. Related MEPs reject call to halt funding for environmental NGOs The Luxembourg-based audit office yesterday censured the European Commission for the lack of transparency over its support for NGOs, but found no evidence of wrongdoing in the sample of funding agreements it examined during the year-long investigation. Niclas Herbst, who chairs the budgetary control committee and drafted its report into the EU's 2023 finances, said the ECA had confirmed its criticism of NGO funding. 'There is a lack of transparency and control as to whether the NGOs in question share our EU values at all. There is still no complete overview of EU funding to NGOs,' said Herbst, who is also an EPP member. For Carlotta Besozzi, director of the umbrella group Civil Society Europe, welcomed the 'more objective' language adopted by the committee. 'We are pleased to see that much of the language that suggested unfounded problems with the funding of NGOs has been removed,' she said. But green groups are not out of the woods yet, according to Patrizia Heidegger, the director general of the European Environmental Bureau, which represents a huge network of NGOs in Brussels, with the eurosceptic ECR group pushing for the parliament to establish a fully-fledged committee of inquiry into the funding issue. Related Commission denies singling out NGOs in green funding row 'An inquiry committee in the parliament is usually set up to investigate a real scandal such as LuxLeaks , massive fraud, corruption and other processes – not to continue a witch hunt against civil society organizations,' Heidegger said. The presidents of the various political groups in the European Parliament will have to decide in a weighted vote whether or not to go ahead with this initiative – with the decision effectively resting in the hands of the EPP, the largest group in the assembly.
