The European Commission will publish its annual rule of law report on 15 July, and few expect the seventh edition to bring good news. The stock-take covers judicial independence, media freedom, anti-corruption and institutional checks in all twenty-seven member states, and it lands amid warnings that democratic backsliding is spreading rather than easing.
Since 2020 the exercise has grown into a full annual cycle, with country visits, consultations and thousands of pages of input from governments, courts and non-governmental groups. Its authority rests less on legal force than on the awkwardness of being named.
The report has become the Commission’s main instrument for flagging problems it cannot easily punish. Each country receives an assessment and a set of recommendations, followed a year later by a verdict on whether governments acted. Increasingly, the answer is that they did not, as the Commission’s own rule of law pages acknowledge.
Hungary remains the sharpest case. Budapest has still not implemented the European Media Freedom Act, prompting an infringement procedure, while state advertising continues to tilt the media market and public broadcasting stays under political control. On the courts, the government amended justice laws again in 2025 without fixing the transparency of case allocation or long-standing concerns over judicial pay.
Slovakia has joined the list of serious worries. Watchdogs point to doubts over prosecutorial independence, a public broadcaster remade under government control, and lawsuits increasingly used to silence journalists and critics. Ministers there have taken to branding reporters as parasites or foreign agents from the podium.
Civil society groups argue the process has lost its bite. In a parallel assessment, the Liberties network described a picture of stagnation and regression, and accused the Commission of cataloguing abuses without forcing change. Journalists’ organisations put it more bluntly, calling the yearly ritual a box-ticking exercise.
Part of the problem is timing. The report arrives as security and defence dominate the European agenda, and as some capitals argue that unity against external threats should soften scrutiny of internal ones. Critics see that logic as a gift to governments already testing the limits of the rule of law.
The value of the report now rests on what follows it. Recommendations carry weight only when the Commission ties them to money, as it has begun to do by freezing funds for the worst offenders. Whether the 2026 edition sharpens that link, or simply restates familiar concerns, will say more about the Union’s resolve than any single country chapter.
