The European Parliament’s Legal Affairs committee has voted to uphold the immunity for Italian MEP Ilaria Salis, who faces attempted murder charges in Hungary over an alleged Antifa hammer attack in Budapest.
Salis was previously imprisoned and confined to house arrest in Hungary for 15 months following a 2023 attack on supposed “neo-Nazis” commemorating Hungarian and Waffen SS soldiers who fought the Soviet Union during the Siege of Budapest during World War II. The alleged hammer attack by multiple Antifa militants is claimed to have left some victims with life-altering injuries.
Despite facing charges of attempted murder, Salis was freed from custody last year after she was elected to the European Parliament as a member of the Greens and Left Alliance in her native Italy, which afforded her parliamentary immunity even though the alleged attack occurred before she became a Member of European Parliament (MEP).
Budapest filed a motion to lift her immunity, however, according to Italy’s Corriere della Sera newspaper, the EU Parliament’s Committee on Legal Affairs (JURI) rejected the request in a secret ballot vote on Tuesday.
The Milanese daily reported that the two votes of the supposedly centrist European People’s Party of Commission Chief Ursula von der Leyen proved critical to the outcome, which was decided by a margin of 13 votes to 12. Yet, the final say on the matter will be decided next month when the full European Parliament will cast a vote.
Responding to the Legal Affairs Committee vote, Hungarian government spokesman Zoltan Kovacs accused the European Parliament of “legitimising far-left terrorism”.
“Ilaria Salis and her comrades travelled to Hungary with the premeditated goal of randomly beating people on the street purely out of political conviction. This is not a political issue, but terrorism,” Kovacs wrote.
“Yet the Brussels comrades are doing everything to let her escape accountability. By upholding her immunity, they are not only excusing a criminal but in fact harbouring an antifascist terrorist. We will not forget, and we will not give up. Ilaria Salis is a dangerous criminal who belongs in prison.”
Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó added that the Legal Affairs Committee “chose to shield Antifa activist Ilaria Salis from justice, the perpetrator who in 2023 assaulted innocent people on the streets of Budapest.”
“The message is clear: with an extremist ideological background, you can get away with anything. A disgrace to Europe,” Szijjártó said.
For her part, the self-described “antifascist” Italian MEP described the vote as an “important and positive signal” and said that she has “full confidence that the Parliament will confirm this choice in the October plenary, affirming the centrality of the rule of law and democratic guarantees.”
Salis claimed that by invoking parliamentary immunity, she was not seeking to escape justice, but that she was merely “protecting myself from the political persecution of Orbán’s regime” and that she would encourage prosecutors in Italy to open a case against her over the alleged attack.
The vote came just one day after U.S. President Donald Trump issued an executive order to designate Antifa as a domestic terrorist organisation in the wake of the apparently Antifa-tied assassination of 31-year-old conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
Last week, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said that his government would follow Trump’s lead and also classify Antifa as a terror group. In his announcement, Orbán specifically cited Salis and the alleged hammer attack in Budapest as an example of the anarcho-communist collective’s history of violence.
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