Several European Union lawmakers have criticized the participation of a former interpreter to Russian President Vladimir Putin in an election observation mission for Hungary’s upcoming parliamentary elections.<\/p>\n
Hungary’s pro-Kremlin government under Prime Minister Viktor Orb\u00e1n is facing a tough parliamentary election on April 12.<\/p>\n
The employment history of Daria Boyarskaya “raises serious questions as to her suitability” for the role, more than 50 lawmakers wrote in a letter.<\/p>\n
People working closely with Putin “undergo stringent security vetting by Russian authorities and are considered highly reliable by the Russian state,” said the letter addressed to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), the body that frequently observes elections.<\/p>\n
Recent media reports suggest that the Hungarian government has been passing information on sensitive EU discussions to Moscow for years.<\/p>\n
This context makes Boyarskaya’s position as the coordinator of the election observation mission “deeply troubling” as the role “grants her broad access to sensitive information and direct interaction with stakeholders whose trust is essential for the credibility of the mission,” the lawmakers said.<\/p>\n
Civil society organizations in Hungary, such as Amnesty International and Transparency International, have announced that they will only cooperate with the OSCE observers.<\/p>\n
The lawmakers urged OSCE to “relieve Ms. Boyarskaya of her duties related to the Hungarian elections with immediate effect.”<\/p>\n
OSCE however dismissed the concerns, saying that Boyarskaya was never Putin’s personal interpreter but was employed by the Russian Foreign Ministry to work at meetings with foreign delegations and in that function also translated for Putin.<\/p>\n
OSCE staff are bound by confidentiality and objectivity, the organisation said, and ruled out changes to personnel decisions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Several European Union lawmakers have criticized the participation of a former interpreter to Russian President Vladimir Putin in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3580,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[3726,3731,39,40,3727,3729,157,3725,3728,3730,64,75],"class_list":{"0":"post-3579","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-eu","8":"tag-daria-boyarskaya","9":"tag-election-observation-mission","10":"tag-eu","11":"tag-european-union","12":"tag-hungarian-government","13":"tag-hungarian-prime-minister","14":"tag-lawmakers","15":"tag-parliamentary-election","16":"tag-parliamentary-elections","17":"tag-transparency-international","18":"tag-viktor-orban","19":"tag-vladimir-putin"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3579","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3579"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3579\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3580"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}