On 18 December 2025, the plenary session of the European Parliament adopted a resolution on the implementation of the rule of law conditionality regime. Five years after the Regulation on a general regime of conditionality for the protection of the EU budget (the "Conditionality Regulation", →eucrim 3/2020, 174-176) came into force, the EP resolution takes stock and draws attention to deficiencies in its implementation. The Conditionality Regulation allows the EU to suspend or reduce funds if rule-of-law breaches pose a direct risk to the EU budget or the EU's financial interests. Key issues raised by the resolution include:

• The Commission must react in a timely manner, in order to ensure a more effective protection of the EU's financial interests;
• The Commission's assessment of rule-of-law breaches lack transparency as it either fails to produce proposed measures or results in the selection of an alternative instrument;
• The Commission should accept complaints in any written form and establish a confidential reporting portal to protect whistleblowers;
• Political deadlock or blackmail used by concerned Member States to obstruct EU decision-making must be rejected;
• The systemic and persistent nature of the breaches of the rule of law by the Hungarian government should lead to a much larger proportion of EU funding being suspended (up to 100% of all funding instead of 55% for specific programmes as applied);
• The relationship between the Conditionality Regulation and other instruments in the rule of law toolbox is unclear, particularly with regard to the horizontal enabling condition on the CFR under the Common Provisions Regulation and the rule of law super milestones under the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF), which undermines trust in the unbiased application of the Conditionality Regulation.

MEPs also reiterated their request for the EP and civil society organisations to play a stronger role in the application of the conditionality regime, including better information sharing.

The resolution sets out a series of recommendations aiming at mproving the effectiveness and transparency of the Conditionality Regulation, as well as its coordination and consistency with other instruments in the rule of law toolbox. Recommendations include revising the 2022 guidelines (→eucrim 1/2022, 22-23), making more proactive use of the Regulation, and strengthening safeguards for the final recipients and beneficiaries. It also advocates a closer integration of the conditionality mechanism with the Commission's annual rule of law reports.

Lastly, the EP calls for a unified, coherent, and comprehensive framework to be established across all EU funding programmes in the 2028-2034 MFF. In this context, all rule of law tools should be consolidated into a single framework.