The government is amending the law to conceal the cost of the Foreign Minister’s private jet travel

Our reporting on the expensive plane rides by the Hungarian Foreign Minister has not been without consequence. A new amendment gives Péter Szijjártó the right to hide data about his travels abroad. Szijjártó even cited the new legislation in an ongoing trial, despite the fact that the freedom of information lawsuit was started long before the amendment.

Citing new legislation, Minister of Foreign Affairs Péter Szijjártó has refused to comply with one of our requests data requests concerning his air travel. The legal text quoted by the Minister is very new: it was incorporated into an existing law at the end of 2024. Like many controversial legislation, the amendment was hidden in an omnibus act with the innocuous title ’Laying the foundations for Hungary’s 2025 central budget’.

This move follows shortly after the third and last public data request we launched on the matter, in which we asked about the cost of Szijjártó’s 2021 private jet tour of Japan.

Since mid-April last year, we have been trying to get data on the cost of Szijjártó’s 2021 official round-trip to Osaka, Kyoto, and Tokyo, as well as Baku, Azerbaijan. The request, denied by the Foreign Ministry, has since become the subject of a freedom of information lawsuit, in which, Szijjártó has started citing the new legislation. However, the Budapest Court already ruled in the first instance that the data is of public interest and must be released.

They denied even even though there are pohotos

Before the amendment, the Ministry rejected our data requests by claiming they did not have the requested data and that we had incorrectly provided the registration number of the aircraft used by the Minister. Based on this feedback, we clarified our request on 2 December 2024, which the Ministry did not reply to.

Importantly, one of our readers captured the take-off of the charter plane before its March 2021 flight to Japan and sent us the photos. In the photos, Péter Szijjártó’s car can be seen arriving at the private plane waiting at the Budapest airport, and the minister himself was photographed boarding the jet.

Péter Szijjártó boarding the 9H-VJW aircraft on 7 March 2021 (photo by our reader)

Public flight data shows the plane marked 9H-VJW (which can be seen on the photographs) flew from Budapest to Osaka, where Péter Szijjártó was also traveling.

The aircraft is an ultra-long-range Bombardier Global 6000 luxury jet registered in Malta, and operated by VistaJet,

a company specializing in business trips and special flights.

The aircraft can carry 14 passengers and can cover a distance of almost 11,500 km on a single refueling, with a cruising speed of around 850 km/h.

The luxury jet flew directly from Ferihegy to Osaka, then to Tokyo, then to Baku, and finally back to Budapest. It did all this at the same time as Péter Szijjártó was visiting these locations, as he reported on his social media page. In the photo, the Foreign Minister is wearing the same outfit with the same sports bag as in the photo posted on his official Facebook page.

Our reader’s photo on the left, Szijjártó’s Facebook photo on the right

This is also significant because the Ministry of Foreign Affairs claimed that they do not have data on the cost of the trip. Replying to a National Authority for Data Protection and Freedom of Information (NAIH) investigation,

the Ministry also claimed that Péter Szijjártó did not fly on the Budapest-Osaka-Tokyo-Baku route on the plane we named.

NAIH did not consider the photos taken by our reader to be conclusive, saying that it was not known whether they were taken at the time, and that they did not clearly identify Péter Szijjártó.

As our data request for the Japanese trip was not met by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs within the legal deadline, we filed a lawsuit for the data.

Changing the law instead of disclosure

During the hearing on 20 March 2025, the presentation of the legal position of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and its oral counterclaim revealed that on 26 February 2025, the Minister of Foreign Affairs issued a decision on the basis of Article 57/A (1) (e) of Act LXXIII of 2016 on Foreign Missions and the Foreign Service, which stated that the request for access to the data specified in the lawsuit could not be granted.

Péter Szijjártó based this decision on the following paragraphs added recently to the lawbooks:

“(1) If… e) the disclosure of data related to the movement abroad of protected persons endangers the enforcement of Hungary’s foreign policy and foreign economic interests free from undue external influence or national security interests, the request for disclosure of such data shall be refused for five years from the date of its creation, and its disclosure shall be prohibited.(2) The following shall be taken into account in determining whether a request for access to the data referred to in paragraph (1) may be granteda) about the data specified in points a) and b) of paragraph (1), the Minister responsible for foreign economic affairs, taking into account Hungary’s foreign policy and foreign economic interests,b) about the data specified in points (c), (d), and (e) of paragraph (1), the Minister responsible for foreign economic affairs shall decide, after having obtained the opinion of the Minister responsible for the management of civil intelligence activities, taking into account Hungary’s national security interests.”

The decision (signed by Szijjártó’s deputy, Levente Magyar) states that the Ministry considers the disclosure of data related to the movement of protected persons to be a particularly high-security risk, claiming that knowledge of the data (e.g. location, travel route) could be used to prepare a future insult or crime against the protected person.

However, it is nonsense that there would be a security risk for the protected person if taxpayers were to find out the cost of the private plane he hired for his trip. Meanwhile, Szijjártó himself publishes photos and videos of his movements abroad almost in real time on his social media pages.

Despite the legal trickery of the Foreign Ministry was in vain, we won the data lawsuit in the first instance. In its 20 March 2025 judgment the court noted that the December amendment to the law on the security of protected persons “only arose in the present lawsuit, as an afterthought”, while our first data request on the subject was filed last spring. Thus, the disclosure of Szijjártó’s foreign travel data could not be refused because “disclosure of such data would jeopardize Hungary’s foreign policy and foreign economic interests free from undue external influence or its national security interests”.

The court also ruled that the Ministry clearly “had, must have had” data on the Minister’s official trip that we have requested.

Funnily enough, the following sentence also appears in the judgment of the General Court: ‘The Court notes that the quoted text of the law is not entirely clear due to grammatical errors, but it is possible to infer the legislator’s intention.’

Since then, a silence on flights

Based on the above, it is clear that the government’s attitude towards the release of expense data related to the Foreign Minister’s private jets on official business – which was previously in order – has radically changed.

This is evidenced by the law amendment of last December and the fact that our public interest requests for data on expenses have since gone unanswered on several occasions.

The last time we submitted a public data request was on 13 March 2025, asking for the costs of three more of Szijjártó’s private jets on official trips, but to no avail. No reply to the data request was received even after the expiry of the 15-day legal deadline set by the Info Act.

This leads us to the conclusion that the Foreign Ministry interprets the December amendment to the law, which was also cited in the data lawsuit, as meaning that Peter Szijjártó, as Minister for Foreign Economic Affairs, is entitled to prohibit the release of expense data on his travels – on the grounds of national security.