Hungary requests Ilaria Salis's immunity be revoked

(ANSA) - ROME, OCT 22 - Representatives of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban's Fidesz party told a plenary session of the European Parliament in Strasbourg on Tuesday that Budapest has requested that the parliamentary immunity of Italian MEP Ilaria Salis be revoked.
    Salis was released from house arrest in Hungary, where she was on trial for allegedly involvement in an assault on far-right demonstrators in February 2023, after being elected as a new member of the European Parliament for the Italian Green and Left Alliance in June.
    Her allegedly inhumane detention conditions during a 16-month spell in a Hungarian jail had provoked protests from Italy.
    During her trial she was also led into court on a chain with her ankles and wrists cuffed, a procedure Hungary says is standard, but which caused widespread shock and indignation here.
    "As I have already said several times, I hope that Parliament will choose to defend the rule of law and human rights without giving in to the arrogance of an 'illiberal democracy' in an autocratic drift which, also through the mouths of its own leaders, has already declared guilty me on several occasions before a sentence has been given," Salis wrote in response to the request for her parliamentary immunity to be revoked.
    "Not only is my personal future at stake, but also, and above all, what we want Europe, increasingly threatened by authoritarian political forces, to be is too". (ANSA).