Budapest, June 26 (MTI) – The fact that the Council of Europe approved the Juergens report on the benefit law on Wednesday was a spectacular failure of Hungarian diplomacy, Zsolt Nemeth (Fidesz) told a press conference in Budapest on Thursday.

    According to the opposition politician, the Hungarian government self-deceptively welcomed those points of the report which called for further amendments to the law.

    The Hungarian Parliament enacted the law in June 2001 and amended it on 23 June 2003.

    Nemeth said the Council of Europe report would not become something they would be proud in the long term.

    Nemeth, who served as state secretary of foreign affairs in the previous government, recalled the Slovak and the Romanian governments had expressed disagreement with the amended benefit law, and Slovakia even held out the prospect of counter-measures.

    "These reactions and the CoE report suggest that Parliament should not have mutilated the benefit law," he said.

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