…bah. Strawman and Ad Hominem. I never mentioned anything about North Korea. But sure as hell I consider Poland immensely more democratic than anything ever envisioned with the EU.
But when you’re finished explaining why you need to sling Ad Hominems in GD, perhaps you will care to say something relevant to the OP?
Rune’s anti EC rants are par for the course among anti-Euro Brits but I am surprized to see his location as Denmark.
Whether of not the EC structure is democratic in its management or not, it gets democratic legitimacy from the support of the structure from the sovereign states which comprise the EC.
Criticism of the democratic deficit either come from anti-EC people who will use any argument to pull down the EC, or Euro-fanatics who want to see a super state. Most Eurpopeans are happy to take the middle road. It is not dissimilar to the situation with the US senate when senators were chosen by state legislatures- we have a directly elected parliament and a set of commissioners- one appointed by each country.
This is all a hijack!
Whether or not Franco Frattini is democratically challenged or not, he is right that in order to remain a member of the EC in good standing, a state must support the European Declaration on Human Rights.
If a European country was found to be allowing CIA extra-legal detention and torture or assisting the CIA in rendering people to such facilities, they would undoubtedly be found to be in contrvention of the declaration and this would call into question their continued active participation in Euro affiars until it was settled.
I forget the exact circumstances, but when it looked as if Austria was to be led by a person from a Neo-Nazi party in charge of a broad rightist government, it was made clear that this would be unacceptable to the EC and Austria’s status within the EC would have been reduced. IIRC this led to the person standing down.
If evidence is produced that camps or transits have been allowed, then we can expect further such threats against the legitimacy of those countries’ Euro involvement to follow.
BBC News is reporting that the German Foreign Minister is currently meeting with the US secretary of state over this very matter- wait for the press conference soon.
CIA director fails to take opportunity to deny the existence of detention/torture facilities overseas:
Not EUs grandest moment either. While Kurt Waldheim was/is undoubtedly a ghastly person, his 9 year stint as position of secretary general of the UN alone should be evidence of that, he was in fact the freely elected President of a democratic nation and head of a conservative, and most certainly not a Neo-Nazi, party - and the EU noise was clearly not so much based on outrage of his past – which was all rumours and hearsay anyway, as it was outrage that they felt he was usurping the Presidency which the Social Democrats had come to expect for granted. Loosing an election sucks. But such is democracy. Of course if democracy don’t work for you, it’s always nice to have a few non-elected Social Democratic friends in the EU which can help you tar the opposition. But in fact the EU bickering didn’t accomplish anything but embittering Austria and further soiling the democratic reputation of the EU. Austria was made an international pariah state, but Kurt Waldheim did not step down, he stayed on as President. And as far as I remember was later acquitted of any war crimes.
You make it sound like the EU is a Hell Angles motorcycle club. Well for some clubs being in bad standing is the best thing.
Undoubtedly. Though I strongly doubt it’ll move beyond the threats.
Nice spin. Anyway Merkel isn’t going to rock the boat. She’s trying to kiss and make up with the US after Schroeder. Condoleezza says she’ll have a look at it. Any day now.
oh. I thought he was talking about Kurt Waldheim because I don’t think Haider was ever set to be in charge of the coalition.
Relevant Legislation:
European Convention on Human Rights
http://www.hri.org/docs/ECHR50.html
EC states are required to abide by this.
Try running a CIA Interrogation/Torture camp under the following conditions:
ARTICLE 1
The High Contracting Parties shall secure to everyone within their jurisdiction the rights and freedoms defined in Section I of this Convention.
ARTICLE 3
No one shall be subjected to torture or to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.
ARTICLE 5
Everyone has the right to liberty and security of person.
No one shall be deprived of his liberty save in the following cases and in accordance with a procedure prescribed by law:
* (a) the lawful detention of a person after conviction by a competent court;
* (b) the lawful arrest or detention of a person for non-compliance with the lawful order of a court or in order to secure the fulfilment of any obligation prescribed by law;
* © the lawful arrest or detention of a person effected for the purpose of bringing him before the competent legal authority of reasonable suspicion of having committed and offence or when it is reasonably considered necessary to prevent his committing an offence or fleeing after having done so;
* (d) the detention of a minor by lawful order for the purpose of educational supervision or his lawful detention for the purpose of bringing him before the competent legal authority;
* (e) the lawful detention of persons for the prevention of the spreading of infectious diseases, of persons of unsound mind, alcoholics or drug addicts, or vagrants;
* (f) the lawful arrest or detention of a person to prevent his effecting an unauthorized entry into the country or of a person against whom action is being taken with a view to deportation or extradition.
Everyone who is arrested shall be informed promptly, in a language which he understands, of the reasons for his arrest and the charge against him.
Everyone arrested or detained in accordance with the provisions of paragraph 1© of this article shall be brought promptly before a judge or other officer authorized by law to exercise judicial power and shall be entitled to trial within a reasonable time or to release pending trial. Release may be conditioned by guarantees to appear for trial.
Everyone who is deprived of his liberty by arrest or detention shall be entitled to take proceedings by which the lawfulness of his detention shall be decided speedily by a court and his release ordered if the detention is not lawful.
Everyone who has been the victim of arrest or detention in contravention of the provisions of this article shall have an enforceable right to compensation.
ARTICLE 6
ARTICLE 13
Everyone whose rights and freedoms as set forth in this Convention are violated shall have an effective remedy before a national authority notwithstanding that the violation has been committed by persons acting in an official capacity.
Of course, the clever people in the Bush Administration have decided that the equivalent interrogation/torture camp at Guantanamo is compliant with the US Constitution.
However, the EC of Human Rights is likely to be considerably more accessible and non-political than SCOTUS
Point of clarity: the prisons were certainly INTENDED to be secret. If you discover a secret that someone is keeping, of course it is no longer a secret, but that doesn’t change the intent to keep it a secret that originally existed.
One of the things I have always been proudest of about America is that we are not the bad guys – we don’t run around torturing and killing people with the full authorization of our government. Looks like that is going by the wayside. Welcome to the Nazification of America brought to you by your local Republican Party (who else)?
(I know, it’s Godwinizing, but what the hell am I SUPPOSED to compare secret prisons with torture and death on the menu to?)
So, somehow, having low profile technocrats who don’t welcome disagreement is an evidence that the EU in on par with Zimbabwe? That’s just plain ludicrous.
Why don’t you make the same point, when, say, the US Secretary of State makes a public statement? I mean, she hasn’t been elected, right? And she’s a very very high profile “bureaucrat”. I’m not sure how well she welcomes disagreement, either. How dares she even speak?
And as for the EU commission, may I remind you that the EU parliament confirmed the nomination, and that it even has been a major pain to find a commission that the parliament would approve?
And I don’t know about you, but personnally, I voted during the election of the EU Parliament. I don’t know about your country, either, but over here, we don’t get to elect every low-profile technocrat, and we have many of these. And they do speak publically. Actually, we don’t even get to elect the ministers. Only the (elected) parliament has a say in the matter. Exactly similar to the EU commission. Thanks to enlighten me, I didn’t know I lived in a non-democratic country similar to Zimbabwe.
You must be pretty busy in Denmark on election days, with all these low-profile bureaucrats you have to vote for.
Zimbabwe huh. Where did I write that? I wrote this particular farce of seeing democratically challenged institutions criticising democratic nations has all the ingredients of a UN humanitarian organisation led by Zimbabwe. And I said I consider Poland to be a vastly better implementation of democracy than the EU. Nowhere did I write the EU is on par with Zimbabwe.
You seem to have some problems keeping from using strawmen (at least you seem to put a rest to the Ad Hominems). But really clairobscur, you oughtn’t need to resort to that, most reasonable people have no trouble find things in what I actually say to vehemently disagree with, without having to constantly resort to imagining things up and putting words in my mouth.
You may. And that’s just the crux of the matter. The impotent Donald Duck parliament, which is the only directly elected institution of the EU, is reduced to accepting and confirming – and in rare cases vetoing - what others decide, without even the right to take any initiate. This is a very stunted form of democracy, not in the least made better by the complexity of power and their history of secrecy and petty corruption, no doubt spurred on by their own knowledge of their own irrelevance. If you should make a comparison with the US, you would have something like all the governors of the states coming together to appoint a President, the Secretary of State, etc. which the senate then could either accept or deny – not individually, but wholesale.
Ask the Americans here if they would be happy with a system wherein they were barred from voting directly for their President and a senate that could only ever say yes or no to whatever is laid before them and never propose anything by itself.
Do they have secret prisions?
They haven’t denied it and considering there’s been more uproar about the existence of such prisons being leaked as opposed to us actually having such prisons in the first place tends to confirm, at least in my mind, that such prisons do exist.
Say, like Jr. going into dad’s room and finding a stash of kiddie porn under dad’s bed, then dad getting upset because Jr. found it, as opposed to it being there in the first place.
I presume he threatens them with that simply because it is the only punishment he has available. Am I wrong?
If so, it does not necessarily follow (as you seem to be implying it does) that the EUhas no legitimate right or authority to punish the state of Poland for provable human rights abuses that might violate treaties into which Poland has entered.
And it would be undemocratic how, exactly? And the US president presents only a very remote similarity with the head of the EU commission.
I’m sure you know perfectly well that if the members of the commision are proposed by the Council, and not by the Parliament, if there’s no elected pesident of the EU, etc…it’s because the member countries wants to keep an individual say in the matter.
And having the power to confirm or veto makes the Parliament an impotent Donald Duck? Here also the Parliament can’t propose a government and only has the right to confirm/veto it. And only in whole, not individually. I still think I live in a democracy. Actually, in essentially all parliamentary democracies, the Parliament can only confirm/veto the government and never get to propose people for the jobs. Could you remind who the Bundestag proposed in Germany following the recent elections, for instance? Could you remind me the result of the popular vote during the last German presiential elections? What? The Parliament didn’t get to propose anybody and the President wasn’t elected by the people??? How undemocratic!!!
I’m happy to know that in Denmark you have a president elected by the people and that the ministers’ (and low-profile bureaucrats, I assume) names are proposed individually by the Parliament but, you know, you can design other systems that are still democratic.
The allegations and investigations and complaints are getting more serious.
From:
"The transatlantic row over the secret transfer of terror suspects by the Bush administration took a new twist yesterday when it emerged that more than 300 flights operated by the CIA had landed at European airports.
According to flight logs seen by the Guardian, Britain was second only to Germany as a transit hub for the CIA, which stands accused of operating a covert network of interrogation centres in eastern Europe. Several European governments have launched urgent investigations into whether clandestine CIA flights were used in the aftermath of September 11 to transfer Islamist prisoners to third countries where they could be interrogated beyond the reach of international law.
The allegations have provoked a furore in Europe. On Tuesday the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, acting on behalf of the EU, asked the US to clarify whether planes containing terror suspects - known as “rendition” flights - had stopped off in Europe. He also raised the allegations made by Human Rights Watch earlier this month about covert interrogation centres.
The US has so far refused to confirm or deny the reports. But on Tuesday the secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, told Germany’s new foreign minister, Franz-Walter Steinmeier, the administration would respond. Ms Rice is likely to come under further pressure when she visits Europe next week. The Guardian’s survey of flight logs taken from 26 CIA planes reveals a far higher level of activity than previously known. The CIA visited Germany 96 times. Britain was second with more than 80 flights by CIA-owned planes, although when charter flights are added the figure rises to more than 200. France was visited just twice and neutral Austria not at all, according to the logs, which also reveal regular trips to eastern Europe, including 15 visits to the Czech capital Prague.
…
The European Council has appointed a special investigator and is examining possible human rights violations by member countries. The European Union has launched an inquiry and the Austrian government has asked the US to explain a US C-130 Hercules that flew into its airspace. The flight logs were obtained from Federal Aviation Administration data and sources in the aviation industry."
Update: Condi Rice has publicly responded to this story for the first time. She dodged the question of whether the U.S. has secret prisons in Europe, but implied that whatever the U.S. may have done there was with the cooperation of the local governments. http://news.yahoo.com/s/cpress/20051206/ca_pr_on_wo/rice_24
She stated that the US did not send rendered individuals to where they will be tortured.
BBC and Channel 4 news went to lengths to point out that this was lawyer speak:
1/ will implies definitively that torture happens- leaving Condeliar free to cover cases where the people may be tortured. That’s a good bit of wiggle room.
2/ **Torture ** in her statement is torture as defined by the US administration- any treatment that does not approach imminent death is not torture. Of course, any civilized person knows what torture really is.
Bottom line- we don’t believe a word she said.
Of course, we also don’t believe a word that Straw or Bliar say about it either.