The Mail on Sunday 22nd April 2007 (UK)
IN A quiet side-street in Vienna, an EU flag hangs from the balcony of a grand baroque building. The building, at No3 Rahigasse, houses the newly created European Union Agency For Fundamental Rights.
But the modest exterior of this new body belies its true importance. The mere existence of the Agency, which started work last month, is living proof that the EU is a permanent coup d’etat.
It has been created to implement the Charter Of Fundamental Rights, which formed part of the European Constitution. Yes — the very same Constitution that was spectacularly rejected in referendums in France and the Netherlands in 2005.
The EU has simply ignored those No votes, and the fact that the Constitution is consequently not in force, and has done what it wanted to do anyway. It is not just that EU leaders announced in Berlin last month that they intended to press ahead and reintroduce the Constitution in a new disguise. It is not just that Tony Blair last week abandoned his 2004 promise to hold a referendum on the Constitution, on the deceitful pretence that the new text will be substantially different from the old.
What the creation of this new Agency shows is that, whatever the outcome of this new overt German-led drive for more centralisation of power in Brussels, the EU grabs power quietly whether there is a legal basis for it or not.
Based on the preexisting European Monitoring Centre for Racism And Xenophobia, the new Agency is a busybody’s dream. It will be the vehicle for EU control over every aspect of people’s lives.
THE Charter Of Fundamental Rights, on which the Agency’s so-called ‘mandate’ is based, contains rules on everything — the right to life, liberty, a fair trial and a family; data protection, consumer protection, environmental protection; freedom of thought and freedom of religion; the rights of the arts and the right to education; the freedom to choose an occupation or to run a business; asylum; cultural divertv : the rights of the child and of people with disabilities; workers’ rights; social security; healthcare; the right to vote. There is even a ‘right to good administration’ — pretty rich, coming from the wasteful and corrupt EU.
All this new power is the responsibility of the new Agency. It won’t come cheap. We are taxed enough already but there is never enough for the eurocrats. The Agency has an initial budget of €9 million a year (£6million), with hundreds of thousands of euros a year earmarked for ‘meetings’ and ‘workshops’, and an average salary for the employees of more than £62,000 per year. Staff numbers are programmed to rise to 100 in the next few years, with the budget growing accordingly.
When Communism collapsed, we thought we had seen the end of such top-down government by faceless commissars. No such luck. Ever since the Constitution was rejected by voters, the democracy-stranglers in Brussels have been trawling through the old EU treaties to find ruses to do what the Constitution would have done if it had been accepted.
As a result, new euro-quangos such as the Agency have mushroomed. There is the European Space Programme, the European Defence Agency, the European External Action Service and Frontex, the external border agency based in Warsaw. In September 2005 — after the Dutch and French referendums the EU even voted itself the power to send people to prison. The determination to implement what voters have rejected is explicit in the legal instrument that created the new Agency.
Its Article 2, like the Agency’s promotional literature, specifically says the defunct Charter Of Fundamental Rights should be its principal reference point. It gave that document the very legal force which voters had denied it in two separate votes. Worse, it did so by breaking the law. In order to pass the relevant regulation, the sly lawyers in Brussels dug up an obscure article in the Maastricht ‘Theaty signed in 1992 (Article 308) which allows ‘measures’ to be taken ‘in the course of the operation of the common market’. But in all its 54 articles and 22 pages, the Charter Of Fundamental Rights does not contain one reference to the common market. The use of Article 308 to create the Agency was brazen cheating. If the EU were a democratic institution based on the rule of law, this regulation would be struck down in the courts and declared invalid. But the people who wrote it knew no one would notice. The European Union is therefore worse than a third-world general who seizes power by force: the EU stages coups like this several times a year, but it does so in secret. It operates according to the principle known to Marxist revolutionaries as ‘the long march through the institutions’, taking control where it matters while people are not watching.
The EU is also deceitful - again, just like the old Soviet Union. Although it is obvious that the No votes in 2005 shocked the euro - elites into abandoning their brief flirtation with direct democracy, they still like to pretend that the EU project has widespread public support.
Article 6 of the regulation creating the Agency says ‘a large public consultation was carried out’ in preparation for it. This is not true. The ‘public consultation’ consisted of one meeting and emails from 14 ‘private citizens’ — not much for an agency which will govern 300 million people. The rest of the so-called ‘consultation’ consisted of memorandums addressed to the EU by its own institutions, member states or associated agencies. The purpose of creating the Agency now is that, when the Constitution is finally rammed through national parliaments in a few years’ time, it will be able to hit the ground running with more than 100 staff.
WHEN that happens, gale-force EU power will be unleashed on the member states. Our control over vital issues such as the functioning of the NHS or our children’s education will be blown away and become the preserve of bureaucrats on the continent.
It is not European citizens who will get new rights when the Charter becomes law. On the contrary it is EU officials and judges who will acquire rights to say what citizens’ rights are.
They will also have the right to limit those ‘rights’: Article 52 of the Charter says that the EU can limit people’s so-called ‘fundamental rights’ in the name of the ‘objectives of general interest recognised by the Union’.
Britain has built up huge democratic capital thanks to careful husbandry and many centuries of political stability: it is now going to be squandered in a few years by devious bureaucrats on the take.
One day, the British will wake up and discover that, thanks to Europe, they have no rights left at all.
* John Laughland is a former lecturer in politics and philosophy at the Sorbonne and at the Institute of Political Science in Paris.
This article was not available on the newspapers website. It was scanned from the hardcopy. All highlighting in red was done by me and not part of the origional article.
