The Qatargate scandal haunting the European Union is not merely about corrupt politicians and officials. The deplorable role of a non-governmental organisation is at the heart of the scandal, which highlights the interlocking of NGOs and EU parliamentarians and decision makers.

The most interesting feature of the corruption scandal surrounding the detention of the EU parliament’s vice-president Eva Kaili and politicians and EU apparatchiks is their connection to a supposedly squeaky-clean NGO called Fight Impunity. The current president of the organisation is Pier Antonio Panzeri, 67, a former Italian leftist MEP. He was arrested after €600,000 in bank notes was found in his house in Brussels. He and his wife and daughter are alleged to have received bribes from a Moroccan diplomat. Even more interesting is the revelation that the executive director of Fight Impunity, Sergio Segio, is a convicted terrorist. He is the former commander of the Italian leftist groupPrima Linea. Segio’s group murdered two Milanese judges. He gained further notoriety when he carried out a bomb attack on a prison to free his former girlfriend. The attack resulted in the death a prison officer and a passer-by.

Segio was arrested in 1983 and sentenced to life imprisonment. Having renounced his violent past, he became a trendy human rights campaigner and lobbyist. In recent years, Segio has presented himself as the Greta Thunberg of the human rights industry.

In his Report on Global Rights: State of Impunity in the World, Segio holds forth about global injustice, a burning planet, ecocide and ethnocide and declares that ‘without environmental justice there is no peace’. He is evidently a supporter of every fashionable cause doing the rounds in the Brussels bubble.

The term non-governmental is curious for it defines these organisations by what they are not.

Like many Brussels-based NGOs, Fight Impunity is in receipt of EU largesse. According to Belgian newspaper Le Soir, this NGO received €175,000 from the European parliament’s foreign affairs committee last year. Despite their holier-than-thou claims to be non-governmental and independent, numerous NGOs regard the EU as a cash cow which supports their activities. According to the report drafted by Markus Pieper, a German Christian Democrat MEP, in 2015, NGOs received funding to the tune of €1.2 billion from the EU. Since then, the funding of NGOs by the EU has continued to increase. In 2020, the EU committed €14.5 billion to support NGOs.

On paper, like all NGOs, Fight Impunity looks purer than pure. That is why it was able to harness the moral authority of NGOs to cover its tracks. Luca Visentini, the general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation resigned less than one month after taking office as he admitted to taking thousands of euros in cash from Panzeri. In his defence, Visentini said that he ‘accepted the donation in cash because of Panzeri’s good reputation’ and because of Fight Impunity’s ‘non-profit nature’. That’s another way of saying that the moral status of a non-profit NGO serves as a mark of honesty.

Prominent leftist oligarchs were happy to associate themselves with it. In the wake of corruption allegations against Fight Impunity’s president, Panzeri, a mass resignation of the board’s membership ensued. Former EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini, former French prime minister Bernard Cazeneuve, former European migration commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos, former MEP Cecilia Wikström and Emma Bonino, a former liberal MEP and foreign affairs minister of Italy swiftly resigned as members of the ‘Honorary Board’ of Fight Impunity.

The hypocrisy of the hustlers running Fight Impunityis breathtaking. It presents itself as a zealous advocate of accountability and of international justice. On its website, it asserts that its aim is ‘to promote the fight against impunity for serious violations of human rights and crimes against humanity’.

If anyone took the trouble to investigate the organisation, they would have swiftly realised that it was nothing more than a website, a public relations machine producing reports on the ills of the world. Many high-profile politicians and their aides who associated with this NGO ought surely to have suspected that it was an empty shell designed to con EU officials and other backers. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that their commitment to human rights and transnational justice did not deter them from leveraging their position to gain financial benefits.

There are tens of thousands of interest groups based in Brussels, whose job it is to influence the EU’s bureaucratic regulators and politicians. For example, the total number of NGOs in Brussels increased from 29,000 in 2008 to just under 35,000 in 2018. It is likely that their number has continued to grow since.

There are also more than 30,000 lobbyists working in Brussels, making it the lobbing capital of Europe. The Economist concluded last year that around 25,000 lobbyists with an annual budget, conservatively estimated at more than €3 billion ($3.6 billion), sought to influence EU policy. As the current corruption scandal involving MEPs and various other members of the EU bubble indicates, there are also considerable sums of undeclared dosh available with which to influence MEPs and officials.

In practice, it is often difficult to distinguish between lobbyists and NGO activists. They both work as members of a special interest group. With so many European national laws starting life at one of the committees of the EU, it is not difficult to understand why a veritable army of these groups spend millions to influence the process of law-making.

EU operatives regard their partnership with NGOs as essential for endowing their institution with a modicum of legitimacy. To legitimate itself, the EU frequently draws on the moral authority of NGOs. EU leaders are even prepared to cede some of their power to seemingly more ‘enlightened’ non-governmental institutions based in Brussels.

NGOs enjoy moral authority on the grounds that they are independent and not beholden to political parties, interest groups and governments. Their reputation for disinterestedness is constantly validated by the media, which treats them as independent organisations, that are by definition objective and therefore authoritative because they are not tainted by political interest.

NGOs frequently boast about their independence from the market and government. But in reality, ‘they are profoundly intertwined with both, especially with government’, concluded Theda Skocpol in her book Diminished Democracy. They are frequently financed by foundations, companies, and public bodies.

The term non-governmental is curious for it defines these organisations by what they are not. Their authority is supposedly based on this. However, the term non-governmental implies a relationship with its opposite, the governmental. In reality, the status of an NGO is linked with its access to governments. In some instances, they work closely with private companies and interests. Private interests attempt to harness the moral authority possessed by NGOs and seek to partner with them. The partnership between Qatar and the politicians associated with Fight Impunity illustrates just how easy it is in Brussels for an NGO to cross the line into the world of corruption.