Claudia Toro

Everyone in Europe argues about the symptoms. Almost nobody looks at the plumbing: who funds the people who write the norms, litigate before the courts and set the boundaries of the debate. Take the best-documented case: the Open Society Foundations, created by George Soros. Over a billion dollars a year. Roughly $32 billion given away since 1984. Not a single voter ever approved one of those dollars. The model is simple and ruthless. You don't need to win an election. You fund NGOs, think tanks, legal clinics, university programs. They produce reports, train lawyers, run strategic litigation. And some of those people end up inside the institutions. Concrete example: the European Court of Human Rights. A 2020 report found that at least 22 of the 100 permanent judges between 2009 and 2019 came from seven NGOs that are highly active before that same Court. Open Society is the main one, and it funds the other six. The worst part: in 88 cases, 18 judges sat on the bench while the NGO they came from was the applicant, the representative or an intervening party. In any listed company, that's called a conflict of interest. None of this is illegal. That's exactly the hack. These institutions were designed to protect themselves from governments and parties. Nobody planned for a private actor funding the entire chain: the plaintiff, the expert, the lawyer, and sometimes yesterday's colleague who is now the judge. Same logic in Brussels: a dedicated policy advocacy institute, tens of millions flowing to NGOs at the heart of the EU, and Open Society among the largest private donors to the Council of Europe. And the money? Soros made his fortune speculating, most famously against the British pound in 1992. But let's be precise: the foundation doesn't make money, it spends it. The return isn't financial, it's normative. Shaping the rules is worth more than any dividend. So stop shouting "Soros" like an incantation. It gets engagement and changes nothing. The problem is structural: any billionaire, left or right, could do exactly the same thing tomorrow. Many already do. What we should demand is rules. Full transparency on the funding of NGOs that litigate before European courts and institutions. Public declarations of interest for judges. Automatic recusal. Traceability of foreign money in lobbying. Stop staring at the puppets. Look at the plumbing. Whoever funds the infrastructure of the debate always ends up writing its conclusions.