EU Referendum

Showing posts with label european council. Show all posts

According to EUBusiness, not an organization that can be accused of euroscepticism, not even in one's wildest dreams (the one in which both David Cameron and Gordon Brown are closet sceptics) the forthcoming European Council may well be a little rocky.

Soaring fuel and food prices posed a stiff challenge to EU leaders gathered for a summit in Brussels on Thursday, amid deep divisions over how to respond to growing calls for action.

Following Irish voters' rejection of the European Union's Lisbon Treaty last week, EU leaders are eager to demonstrate that the bloc can tackle the toughest issues and has not slumped back into a period of painful navel-gazing.

Why break the habit of a lifetime, say I, and stop navel-gazing?

The problem is that there are as many solutions to the problem of rocketing fuel prices as there are countries. Tax cuts or tax rises? Less regulation or more? EU-wide action or by individual member states? Short-term measures (always a good idea if you are a politician) or long-term but possibly painful solutions? New research, perhaps, but into what and with what results?

It will all add up to an entertaining couple of days, is my opinion.

Maryam+Rajavi[i-Maryam+Rajavi]The news from Iran is becoming ever more disquieting – for the Iranian authorities, that is. The riots caused by petrol rationing have obviously shaken the regime because they have gone the way regimes always go when confronted with a problem: they have banned all local reporting of it and, to make sure, that nothing leaked out, switched off the text messaging system.

As the BBC reports it, the ban was circumvented by some newspapers, described as reformist. One way or another we know that there have been demonstrations in various parts of Iran and several police campaigns against people who show themselves to be disobedient to the rule of the Mullahs. (We have written about those campaigns here, here and here.)

It is, therefore, particularly odd for the European Council to persist in keeping the main Iranian opposition group, the People's Mujahideen of Iran (PMOI) on the list of terrorist organizations, without providing any evidence for this.

As my colleague and Christopher Booker have pointed out, this organization was first put on that list by the then British Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, at the request of the Iranian government. It was British perseverance that put the organization on the EU black list. (Who says we have no influence in Brussels?)

Last December the lower court of the ECJ ruled that this was unlawful, not least because the PMOI had never been given sight of any evidence to show that it supported terrorism. But in January, in an unprecedented breach of European law, the European Council agreed with Britain that the ECJ's ruling should be ignored (a decision personally defended by Tony Blair in a letter I have seen, dated March 19).

In a cynical nod to the ECJ, the Council did, in March, send the PMOI 16 documents supposedly justifying its actions. This turned out to be a self-parodying "dodgy dossier", including a 10-year old article from Time magazine and items trawled from unidentified websites, which contained not a shred of evidence that the PMOI was engaged in terrorism. Indeed the dossier broke another EU law, in that it was legally obliged to contain current evidence, whereas none of its contents referred to events later than 2001.

There is a reason why none of the evidence stopped in 2001 – that was the year in which the PMOI foreswore violence. According to an article on EUObserver, the Iranian government has cast severe doubts on that. Well, not so much cast doubts as stated that it did not matter: once a terrorist always a terrorist. The British government and the European Council apparently agree with this, disregarding the fact that they have accepted similar assurances from Sin Fein/IRA.

As the same article reports the latest list of terrorist organizations still includes the “Mujahedin-e Khalq Organisation (MEK)...a.k.a...the People's Mujahidin of Iran (PMOI)”. And still no evidence has been produced. What about the ECJ decision, which ought to count for more than statements by Iranian officials?

The PMOI decision has seen a howl of protest from Paris-based sister group the NRCI, with NRCI spokesman Shahin Gobadi telling AP that "tens of thousands" of Iranian exiles will stage a march in Paris on Saturday.

The NRCI says that an EU court ruling last December, which annulled a 2002 decision to put PMOI on the register and freeze its funds, has not been honoured. But EU lawyers say the verdict does not cover subsequent decisions.

Right. Let me get this straight. There is a legal decision by a court that is authorized to decide in the matter. The politicians then go against that decision and announce that the legal judgement does not apply to what happened after it. Interesting.

Incidentally, in case you are wondering, Hezbollah is not on the proscribed list. In fact, it is a little surprising that Hamas is. Perhaps Iran is not as closely involved in what has been going on in Gaza as we think.

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Austria%20Council[i-Austria%20Council]The EU Council yesterday refused to give the commission powers to force Austria to ditch its ban on two GM maize varieties which have been approved for use throughout the EU.

The picture shows a jubilant Josef Proell, the Austrian agriculture and environment minister (left), being congratulated by the Estonian environment minister after the meeting – a scene witnessed by an enthralled interpreter in her booth (ringed - see also enlargement, below right).

This is the latest step in a bizarre drama which has been played out ever since May 2000 when Austria drafted a Genetic Technology Prohibition Law, allowing its regions to declare themselves GM-free.

link[i-link]The EU Commission rejected the law but Upper Austria persevered, seeking to impose a three-year ban on the use of GMOs to "protect organic and traditional agricultural agriculture and to prevent hybridisation."

In so doing, it invoked Treaty article 95(5), the so-called "environmental guarantee" clause, which allows member states to take specific action to protect its environment, but the Commission did not accept the this application of the Treaty.

That case was referred to the European Court of Justice and, on 5 October 2004, the EU Court of First Instance ruled that Austria had failed to provide scientific justification for the measures, after the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) published an opinion that stated that no new evidence for health or environmental risks was presented by the Region to justify its law.

Since then, the commission has been seeking powers to enforce the removal of the ban, for which it needed Council approval but, by a qualified majority, the Council has once again thwarted any attempts to bring the errant member state into line.

In a direct snub to both the commission and the court, the Council has declared that a member state has the power to restrict the use and/or sale of a GMO and that the different agricultural structures and regional ecological characteristics in the European Union need to be taken into account in a more systematic manner in the environmental risk assessment of GMOs.

On that basis, the Council considered there were sufficient grounds for rejecting the Commission's demand for new powers and that the use of the temporary precautionary measures was justified.

The campaigning organisation Friends of the Earth is delighted with the decision, but the commission, which went the extra mile in an attempt to accommodate Austria, is in serious trouble.

Its action is in response to a WTO finding that so-called "national GMO safeguards" are a breach of its rules – after a case taken by Argentina, Canada and the United States - leaving the EU as a whole in breach of its WTO obligations.

The commission was supported only by Britain, Sweden, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic and now the commission has to consider its next step, which could include a reference to the European Union Court, challenging the Council's decision.

Whatever the outcome, this is a major defeat for the commission and one that strengthens the resolve of the member states. Next in line are Hungary and Greece, where the confrontation could be repeated – with like result. If that is the case, Mr Barroso's commission will be taking on the aspect of a lame duck, presumably the single European lame duck.

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Zap%20Junck[i-Zap%20Junck]Something we didn't pick up from the general media is a report on an English language Spanish site which headlines a piece: "EU summit on the European Constitution set for Madrid in January".

We are told that, at the "European Summit" (i.e., Council) on Friday, Spain and Luxembourg announced a joint initiative to try to recover the idea of a European Constitution. The prime ministers announced a new EU summit between the 18 countries which have already ratified the document, to be held in Madrid on 26 January.

These were Spanish prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and the failure of Luxembourg, Jean-Claude Juncker, the man whose one aim in life is to see his bébé come out of intensive care.

How instructive it is, though, that Blair, immediately following the European Council, jetted off to Egypt – with a brief stop-over in Turkey - in a bid to resolve the growing Mid-East crisis. He went not as a plenipotentiary of the EU, nor as one of an EU "troika" or whatever other grouping they tend to go for. He went as Tony Blair, prime minister of the United Kingdom.

erdogan-blair_b[i-erdogan-blair_b]Furthermore, how interesting it is was, while in Turkey, Blair met his counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and talked not of Turkey's (failing) bid to enter the EU but of how to revive peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians (not that that is possible if the latter are determined to rip themselves apart in a civil war).

Thus do the "little Europeans" condemn themselves. With their obsessive navel-gazing, they are not only boring us all to death but highlighting the pathetic vacuity of their agenda and their irrelevance as world players.

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