Ruling parties had sabotaged the meeting, says national security committee head

A closed meeting of the national security committee, which would have heard government office representatives on the planned campus of the Chinese Fudan university and on the cyber attack against government vaccine registration sites, among other issues, lacked quorum on Tuesday as government party lawmakers failed to attend.

Committee head János Stummer of Jobbik said ruling party lawmakers had “sabotaged” the meeting, and pledged to “not leave them or the government in peace” until the committee can table the issues in question.

Regarding the government’s vaccine registration site, which crashed on Friday during a surge in registration attempts, LMP’s committee member Péter Ungár said the site was either subject to “cynically timed” cyber attacks or “just of very poor quality”. If the “six crashes in the past six months” were cyber attacks, the National Cyber Security Centre should report on the measures taken so far, he said.

Ungár said

the committee had also wanted to hear László Palkovics, the minister of innovation and technology, on the planned campus of China’s Fudan University in Budapest.

The committee wanted to know whether the loan contract between Hungary and China for the construction of the campus contained a so-called stability clause, barring the government from introducing changes to work and environmental regulation pertaining to the university, he said.

Zsolt Molnár of the Socialist party said

the “procedural and technical tricks hampering the committee’s work are a fool-proof sign of upcoming elections”.

The ruling party lawmakers “have exposed their own cowardice and kept the public from knowing the truth” about the issues raised, he said.

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