Following last night's extraordinary joint hearing of the Committees on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs and Culture on the recently adopted controversial Hungarian Media law, ALDE Leader Guy Verhofstadt stated: "The European Commission must continue its analysis and come swiftly to its conclusions on the compatibility of this law with EU acquis, while the Hungarian government should live up to its commitment to change the law on the basis of the Commission's recommendations. It is high time for the Commission to come up with a legislation laying down minimum standards for media freedom, to ensure EU monitoring and application of the Charter of Fundamental rights in this field in all Member States".

ALDE Vice-president of the LIBE Committee Sophie in 't Veld (D66, Netherlands) said: "Each time we criticise restrictions on media freedom in individual EU Member States, as we did in the case of Italy, the Czech Republic and Hungary, we see the same reflex. Those countries complain it is unfair that they are being singled out. The debate is then dominated by that, distracting from the core issue: gagging journalists is a violation of European fundamental rights. The EU needs a watchdog on media freedom and the European Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) would be suitable for this task. The European Parliament should grant a mandate to the FRA to issue an annual report on media freedom in each Member State of the EU on the basis of which the Commission and Parliament could assess the need for action."
 
ALDE LIBE coordinator Renate Weber (PNL, Romania) said: "The Hungarian media law is highly problematic since it introduces a set of restrictions never found before in a single EU Member State, running against EU legislation and the Council of Europe minimum standards on media freedom, as underlined by the OSCE analysis, whose recommendations should also be applied to the media law to ensure it is compliant with fundamental rights standards. Parliament needs to investigate the whole issue of press freedom in a comprehensive way across the EU and should mandate a committee to draft a report for plenary in this regard."