Revealed: Shady Report Used to Justify Orbán’s Asylum for Fugitive Polish MP

Szabolcs Panyi (VSquare),
Photo: Zoltán Fischer (Hungarian PM's Office) 2025-01-11

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For Viktor Orbán, the basis for granting asylum to fugitive Polish politician Marcin Romanowski was a mere four-page pamphlet. We have found this document: it has no author but heavily cites a platform run by the Polish ultra-conservative Ordo Iuris Institute.

In December, Polish-Hungarian relations hit a new low as Hungary granted political asylum to Marcin Romanowski, a former Deputy Minister of Justice in the Law and Justice (PiS) government, who is accused of 11 crimes, including corruption and abuse of office. Hungary’s government has yet to provide a clear justification for this decision, which effectively challenges the legitimacy of Poland’s judicial system. At his annual press conference, Viktor Orbán merely stated that the decision was based on a “comprehensive study” of the rule of law in Poland.

In VSquare’s latest Goulash newsletter, we reveal what kind of study this refers to. We filed a public information request with several Hungarian ministries. Ultimately, the Prime Minister’s Cabinet Office informed us that Orbán had referred to a study published by the ultra-conservative, Hungarian government-supported think-tank, the Center for Fundamental Rights.

The study, titled “The Rule of Law Is Under Threat in Poland: 10 of the Most Blatant Moves by Donald Tusk’s Liberal Polish Government,” is an anonymous, four-and-a-half-page pamphlet. Many of the quotations it references come from the Rule of Law Observer, an online platform run by the influential ultra-catholic Ordo Iuris Institute and other organizations supporting Poland’s Law and Justice party.

“The Rule of Law Is Under Threat in Poland: 10 of the Most Blatant Moves by Donald Tusk’s Liberal Polish Government” Source: alapjogokert.hu

Hungary’s Center for Fundamental Rights and Poland’s Ordo Iuris Institute have long collaborated—as we revealed in 2021, they conducted a joint campaign against the ratification of the Istanbul Convention, among other things. At the time, Marcin Romanowski, then deputy to Zbigniew Ziobro in the Ministry of Justice (which was trying to withdraw from the convention), argued that the Istanbul Convention was a “gender Trojan horse” and that it was high time to withdraw from it.

The Center for Fundamental Rights itself appears to have only one Polish expert, Sébastien Meuwissen, a Belgian-Polish citizen who previously worked for several Law and Justice politicians, including former Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki.

Meuwissen also served as a communications director for the Ordo Iuris Institute and has published articles for many years with the Visegrád Post, a fringe far-right site later revealed to be part of the Voice of Europe network — a Russian intelligence operation aimed at covertly funding and supporting the far-right across Europe. This site, where Meuwissen published, was managed by two French Russophile far-right figures based in Budapest, whose secret Russian funding was uncovered during a joint European counterintelligence operation investigating Voice of Europe and the people behind it.

Is Meuwissen the author or co-author of the study Orbán cited as the basis for the Romanowski asylum decision? We contacted him and his employer, but as of publication, we have not received a response.

Meuwissen first gained public attention in Poland in 2019 when he appeared on TVP (government-controlled media) criticizing then-opposition leader Donald Tusk, introduced as a “journalist from Belgium”—while in reality, he was simultaneously interning at TVP.

Szabolcs Panyi

VSquare’s Budapest-based lead investigative editor in charge of Central European investigations, Szabolcs Panyi is also a Hungarian investigative journalist at Direkt36. He covers national security, foreign policy, and Russian and Chinese influence. He was a European Press Prize finalist in 2018 and 2021.