The European Commission’s funding of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) is “opaque” and exposes the executive to “reputational risk”, the European Court of Auditors (ECA) has concluded following a lengthy probe. But its report may not be the smoking gun that some critics were hoping for.
“We did not find a single case during our audit of an NGO breaching EU values,” the ECA member responsible for the report, Laima Andrikienė, told reporters at a briefing shortly before publication.
This came with the caveat, however, that her office had examined a random sample of only 90 contracts, and may have missed something. “We have hundreds of thousands of NGOs,” Andrikienė said. “Any case, any example of NGOs breaching EU values would put the reputation of the European Union at risk.”
She further confirmed that there was no restriction on civil society groups making their case directly to lawmakers, who are required to publish details of all meetings with lobbyists, whether civil society or corporate.
“From our point of view, the rules allowed NGOs to lobby,” Andrikienė. “If we want something different, it is for the legislators to decide, not for the auditors.”
The ECA published its findings at a time when the issue of NGO funding has become a divisive political issue in Brussels. The European Parliament rejected by a single vote last week a motion to censure the EU executive over operating grants disbursed through the LIFE environmental programme.
The conservative European People’s Party (EPP) claims the Commission instructed NGOs to lobby members of the parliament to further specific policies within the Green Deal, a central political agenda of president Ursula von der Leyen’s first term between 2019 and 2024.
A lack of ‘hard evidence’
However, the group and its allies further to the right have not presented any concrete proof to back up these allegations.
Budget Commissioner Piotr Serafin, however, conceded in January that it had been “inappropriate for some services in the Commission to enter into agreements that oblige NGOs to lobby members of the European Parliament specifically”.
But despite the machinations of some groups within the parliament and media investigations of leaked copies of confidential operational grant agreements, no such obligations – which have been vehemently denied by environmental groups – have been demonstrated.
And it seems the Luxembourg-based audit office – which looked at two LIFE Progamme operating grants (no NGOs are named in the report) during its investigation – has drawn the same blank.
Some “elements of lobbying” were detailed in the work programmes that applicants must draw up when applying for grants, said Tomasz Kokot, an ECA official who worked on the audit. But the auditors were in no position to say whether – as right-wing lawmakers have asserted – Commission officials had demanded such commitments from the applicants.
“All we can say is that we have not found hard evidence for any of those situations,” Kokot told reporters.
The auditors were also pressed on why they chose to focus their probe on NGOs only in Germany, Spain and Sweden, despite explicitly stating that a major factor that prompted their investigation was the 2022 scandal involving Qatari officials, where NGOs were allegedly used to channel cash to corrupt lawmakers – an affair that rumbles on.
“We chose them because they had the largest expenditure reported,” Andrikienė said, naming European Social Fund Plus and the Asylum, Migration and Integration fund as the two largest sources.
The Commission’s response
The ECA made three recommendations to the Commission. The EU executive said it “partially accepts” to update the legal definition of an NGO to clarify by the end of the year the criteria for “independence from government” and the situation when an “entity is pursuing its members’ commercial interests”.
Similarly, on a call to improve the searchable Financial Transparency System detailing EU spending online by 2029, the Commission said it would “explore the feasibility” of implementing more frequent updates.
The third recommendation was the only one that the EU executive accepted fully: to “explore the feasibility of developing the current systems to include risk-based verification of the recipients’ (including NGOs’) compliance with EU values, in order to detect potential breaches”. The target deadline is 2028.
On the issue of alleged lobbying via NGOs, the Commission pointed to guidance published last May – shortly after the audit was launched – which “clarified that funding agreements involving specifically detailed activities directed at EU institutions and some of their representatives, even if legally sound, may entail a reputational risk for the Union”.
Officials responsible for allocating funding must take this guidance into account, it wrote.
Ariel Brunner, the director of BirdLife Europe – a recipient of an operating grant – saw the ECA’s failure to identify any problems with LIFE Programme funding as a vindication. “This report confirms what we’ve long said: the real problem isn’t reputable NGOs – it’s lobbyists in disguise, posing as civil society.”
“What they did find is a failure by the Commission and national governments to check who’s actually behind some so-called NGOs that don’t represent public interests,” Brunner said.
