MCC Brussels is preparing to challenge its suspension from the European Union’s Transparency Register, a measure that restricts its access to meetings, events, and participation mechanisms within the EU institutions.
The notification arrived on Friday, June 12, at 4:58 p.m., just two minutes before the end of the working day. Anthony Gilland, Chief of Staff, and John O’Brien, Head of Communications, have now reconstructed in a video the fourteen months of letters, questions, and successive extensions that culminated in the provisional exclusion.
The procedure began following a complaint submitted in 2025 by Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO). According to MCC Brussels, the accusation was markedly political: it linked the think tank to Viktor Orbán, the 2024 farmers’ protests, and events critical of EU climate policies. It also questioned the financial information published by the organisation.
That line of inquiry ended without establishing any accounting irregularities or concealed funding. The investigation then continued on a different basis: the so-called principle of single registration.
Brussels maintains that MCC Brussels and the Hungarian Mathias Corvinus Collegium foundation should appear under a single registration. The think tank argues that it is an AISBL (a legal form for a nonprofit organisation with an international purpose) incorporated in Belgium since August 2023, legally separate and operationally autonomous, although it receives funding from MCC Hungary.
At the heart of the challenge is the alleged unequal treatment. Gilland explains that the Register’s own website allows separate registrations when an affiliate represents interests distinct from those of its parent organisation. MCC says it has identified precedents—including WWF, BirdLife, Caritas, Friends of the Earth, ILGA, Open Society, and Mozilla—in which linked entities retain individual registrations.
“This case has never really been about transparency. It has been about control. When the original complaint against MCC Brussels collapsed, the Transparency Register Secretariat simply went looking for another reason to keep the investigation alive. That is not impartial regulation; it looks like institutional gatekeeping,” the Head of Communications explained to europeanconservative.com.
In the video, they highlight the case of WWF Mediterranean, whose registration was reportedly approved in June 2025 as a separate legal entity, while MCC was already under investigation on the same grounds.
During the proceedings, the organisation received five letters containing 22 pages of questions. MCC says it always responded within the required 20 working days, while the Secretariat took months to reply. Following the suspension, more than 50 MEPs from Patriots for Europe (PfE), European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR), Europe of Sovereign Nations (ESN), and non-attached representatives called on Ursula von der Leyen to investigate the case.
The dispute goes beyond legal and transparency issues. Although registration is formally voluntary, in practice it determines access to commissioners, senior officials, accreditations, and parliamentary activities. Whoever administers the Register also determines who is allowed into Brussels’ political conversation (transparency becomes a filter when the regulator decides without external oversight).
O’Brien says “Brussels lectures Europe about democracy and pluralism, yet when a conservative think tank challenges the prevailing orthodoxy, the bureaucracy appears more interested in finding a pretext to exclude it than engaging with its ideas,” adding
If this can happen to us today, it can happen to anyone tomorrow.
