EU Referendum

Showing posts with label Tillack case. Show all posts

Tillack[i-Tillack]Media for Freedom reports that the accusations of bribery against the journalist Hans-Martin Tillack have been dismissed by a Belgian court for lack of evidence. Aparently the International Federation of Journalists is now calling on the EU "to tell the whole truth" about the complaints and why they were made. I guess it is a little difficult to work out why there should be ridiculous legal attempts to silence journalists who write about corruption about the European Union and its anti-corruption unit, OLAF.

Herr Tillack's supporters are calling for a formal apology from EU officials. We are calling for a full display of the Porcine Air Force in the skies above Brussels.

Daniel Hannan gives the full story in First Post, adding:

On Tuesday, the Belgian state was ordered to pay Tillack €10,000 in compensation and €30,000 costs. At least the poor fellow will get his hands on the moolah while there still is a Belgian state to pay him.

The first commenter wonders why he has not seen anything about this outrage in the British media. Well, perhaps, he should have been reading EUReferendum. We covered the subject exhaustively. But there's none so blind ...

Casablanca+02[i-Casablanca+02]I am shocked, I tell you, shocked. It seems that after years of denying it, OLAF has admitted that, ahem, yes, actually “senior official did ask to see documents obtained by Belgian police when they raided the offices of a German investigative journalist”.

We are once again talking about the case of Hans-Martin Tillack, the German journalist whose painful saga we followed assiduously.

According to the European Voice, a spokesman for OLAF, Alessandro Buttice, “told the head of the international journalists association API in an email on 28 March that a director at OLAF had requested access to the files of Hans-Martin Tillack”. This had been strenuously denied by Franz-Hermann Brüner, OLAF's director-general, and Siim Kallas, the European commissioner for the fight against fraud to journalists, the Toy Parliament in Strasbourg (or was it Brussels?) and the Court of First Instances.

Herr Brüner has now realized that some of his statements were or, to be precise, “one element” in his statements was not factually correct. That was, as it happens, the most important element to do with OLAF’s involvement with the Belgian police’s “investigations”.

How did they find this lack of factual correctness? Well, it seems that a new broom appeared.

The error was detected when Thierry Cretin, who was appointed director at OLAF for investigation and operations, reviewed the case. The request was made by Cretin's predecessor Alberto Perduca, who is now working at the EU mission in Kosovo.

Well, it’s good to know that old officials of OLAF, however improperly they may have behaved do not die or even fade away. They just go to another EU appointment. But then you knew that, I expect.

Interestingly, Herr Brüner apologizes for misleading the International Federation of Journalists and the International Press Association but makes no mention of the fact that he and Commissar Kallas also misled the Toy Parliament and the Court of First Instances. Normally, it is considered to be rather bad form to mislead a court of law.

Needless to say, there will be an internal enquiry.

Tillack[i-Tillack]Only EUObserver has bothered to report the fact that after several years of unpleasantness the Belgian police have dropped their case against the Stern journalist Hans Martin Tillack.

We have followed the story since 2004 and here is the link to all of the postings, so our readers, should they wish to, can read them in order.

The end of the whole sorry tale is summed up here:

The Belgian police have said they will return almost a thousand pages of documents to a former Brussels journalist, ending a years-long saga that was judged a violation of freedom of expression by the European Court of Human Rights.

On Wednesday (30 January), Belgian police commissioner Philippe Charlier informed the Brussels office of German news magazine Stern that the documents confiscated in 2004 will be returned.

Well, that’s nice. On top of that the Belgian authorities have agreed to abide by the instructions of the European Court of Human Rights and pay “€10,000 for "moral damages" as well as €30,000 in costs”. Mr Tillack said that he would donate the €10,000 to the relief fund of the International Federation of Journalists who had supported him in his travails.

This is a somewhat unusual event in that the IFJ actually helped someone to win. Normally, they just wring their hands about press freedom suddenly disappearing because of war on terror. As we have pointed out before, the IFJ seems to live in a world of its own in which they could actually make this comment in 2005:

…the war on terrorism amounts to a devastating challenge to the global culture
of human rights and civil liberties established almost 60 years ago…/span>

At the time, we wrote this and see no reason for changing a single word:

Excuse me? Global culture of human rights and civil liberties that has existed for almost 60 years?

Those 60 years saw, among other developments, Stalin’s second purge, the Communist purges in Eastern Europe, the murder of many millions of Chinese under Mao’s regime (and if there is a culture of human rights and civil liberties in China, I must have missed it), the rule of Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam and of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, not to mentionKim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il in North Korea.

Those 60 years saw the devastation of one African state after another to the point where human rights and civil liberties are not words most of the unfortunate people of that Continent can even begin to understand.

Those 60 years saw the rule of the two Assads and of Saddam Hussein, not to mention other tyrants in the Middle East and the Gulf region.

Shall I go on? Well, yes, the last couple of years saw a rapid movement back into autocracy in Russia, temporarily, we hope, in Ukraine, more permanently in Belarus, Moldova, Kazakhstan and all the other stans.

It seems the murder of Gongadze in Ukraine and the near murder of Anna Politkovskaya in Russia (to pluck two cases at random – there are many more) are not a challenge, devastating or otherwise to human rights or civil liberties, as established nearly 60 years ago.

None of that matters except for the war on terror even though Anna Politkovskaya has, in fact, been murdered, as have several other Russian journalists. Considering that the IFJ has spent all this time simply helping Mr Tillack’s get his papers back (and he has not yet been given them, merely promised), the Federation’s ability to aid and defend its own is limited.

Its notion of how to tell the world about the Russian government’s treatment of the media is to hold a conference in Moscow. Apparently the organizers are indifferent to the sort of impression that might create in the remote possibility of anybody apart from World Politics Review noticing it.

Apart from all that, one wishes Hans Martin Tillack well. One would, however, like to know what his opinion about the European Union is now. At the beginning of this whole mess, as I recall, he was a europhiliac and was rather shocked that he, a supporter of the project who wished to see it reform itself in order to appear more attractive to the people of Europe, should have been treated in such a dastardly fashion. Has he progressed from that position at all?

Tillack[i-Tillack]Abraham Lincoln, who was an extremely cunning politician, had different methods of speaking. Sometimes, as at Gettysburg, he spoke tersely and to the point. At other times he told folksy stories to divert his listeners and convince them that he was really a very ordinary guy. Political spin was not invented ten years ago.

One of his folksy performances involved a story about a man who was chopping wood while his wife was gathering kindling when a bear attacked her. According to Lincoln, the man sat down on a log, put the axe next to him and shouted, according to who was winning: “Go it woman. Go it bear.”

That is more or less the way I feel about the clash, long predicted, between the European Court of Human Rights and the European Court of Justice. With the ECJ wanting to take over from the ECHR as the ultimate arbiter of all matters, including human rights, and the ECHR wanting to rule the world (well, those bits of it that are part of the Council of Europe) a clash at some point was inevitable.

Mind you, this is not yet their Cuba. The two superpowers do not stand face to face yet. They are still fighting through proxies, in this case the Belgian police.

These thoughts were occasioned by the ECHR ruling that

the right to protect the identity of sources was an essential pillar of freedom of the press.

Yes, dear readers, we are back with the Tillack case. The ECHR has awarded him €10,000 in damages and €30,000 for costs and expenses. One assumes that it will be the Belgian authorities who will be liable for the sums, not OLAF or Eurostat, the body he had been investigating when this whole appalling saga began.

Let us have a quick review of our coverage. Here are two summaries, when the journalist and his employers, Stern magazine took the case to the European Court of Justice and when the Court of First Instances decided against him. In the latter story we quoted the judgement, which cleared OLAF, whose job it is to sort out the blatant corruption in the institutions of the European Union, of handing material over to the Belgian police (something that they have now admitted) and of smearing Mr Tillack’s good name.

Needless to say, the ECJ agreed with the Court of First Instances and decided that OLAF was not guilty of anything it was being accused of. This is now being used as an excuse by the spokesman for the Commission. Commenting on the ECHR decision, Johannes Laitenberger commented rather smugly that it is “Belgium that had been found at fault rather than EU institutions”.

"Neither OLAF nor the commission has the possibility to order member states' authorities to take any particular action," Laitenberger said, adding that a separate but related case against the Commission and OLAF in the European Court of Justice had been lost by Tillack in October 2006.

OLAF said it had no alternative but to hand over the information to the Belgians who were responsible for subsequent actions. "Our legal base required us to transfer the information to the judicial authorities," said Jörg Wojahn, its spokesman.

As I recall, OLAF insisted that it had nothing to do with the Belgian case and had not handed over any documentation to the Belgian police not that it had no option but to do so.

Oh and in case anyone is wondering:

None of the allegations of fraud at Eurostat has yet come to trial according to OLAF. But it says that two dossiers have been sent by an examining magistrate to the prosecutor in Luxembourg and that a separate judicial investigation is still under way in Paris.

No change there, in other words. Still, once started on this path of finding in opposition to the ECJ, the ECHR may well decide to continue to do so.