Yet once upon a time, the most Fundamental political Right was agreed and recognized by politicians ... or rather by real Statesmen. They were the Founding Fathers. Today's politicians are trying to bury that fact. They are trying to blot out all memory that it once was recognized by governments and in treaties.
The Council of Ministers would be horrified if you or any other citizens knew about it! They fear the case against their dictatorial attitudes will be lost -- not only in the Court of Public Opinion. It could be lost and reversed against them in the European Court of Justice! This is also the reason that the European Commission, the Council of Ministers, the European Parliament and the somnabulent Economic and Social Committee refused to recognize the Great Charter was 60 years old on 18 April 2011. It is the reason that the Great Charter of the European Community has never been publicized by the politically submissive Commission.
The politicians and more specifically the political parties want 500 million citizens to forget that they can do far more than just kick them right out of power -- all of them. Elections are not much use if all parties are corrupt or aquiesce to the corruption of others, as a recent case showed. What power does the consumer have if a cartel or a multinational lobbyist is simultaneously subsidizing and wining and dining all the major parties? Political parties are Europe's biggest unregistered lobbyists. They can hide unsavoury lobbying of the powerful, as can goverment ministers. An election only changes one set of faces for the next but the policy bought by an industrial cartel stays the same. The cartel is laughing all the way to the bank.
Because parties have their own agenda, their own ideologies, but also a shotage of funds from the public, they lack public support. It is that distrust between the people and their supposed representatives that the Fundamental Right of the Great Charter addresses. In the People's Democratic Republics of the Soviet era, the people were allowed to vote for a variety of parties but it made not the slightest difference about freeing themselves from the Soviet orbit. Nor did they have freedom of thought, for example in religious matters or anti-Marxist criticism.
Today what is most important is for the citizens to retain the right to decide what type of democracy Europe should have. The major parties form a political cartel of power against the 98 percent of the population who refuse to join a party or even vote. A system run by a political cartel defending their super-privileged power structures is another form of dictatorship.
- It can refuse to recognize any and all national referendums against their proposals (such as the Constitutional Treaty).
- It can refuse to allow referendums in other countries where they know the cause is lost before they start.
- It can call a treaty by another name, refuse to publish the text and force it through parliament because they have a whipping system to ensure party obedience.
- It can then increase their own salaries and expenses without any controls -- such that the 'expenses' are far more than the average wages of ordinary citizens.
- It can hold budget meetings in secret, excluding the press.
- It controls the purse-strings of the budget, jobs, committees and policies.
- It can ignore public opinion. Policies are often simplistic as politicians are unable to deal with the complexity of modern life and all too often they impose ideas at variance with public opinion (who often know better).
- It can contort healthy economic policy to stay in power. Politicians encourage property booms and financial bubbles because they provide instant cash for their State projects. They refuse to balance the budgets preferring to try to bribe voters with money they do not have. The public then pays for the consequences.
Today we do not have supranational democracy but intergovernmentalism by a party cartel. What is important, as in 1989, is the right of citizens to change the whole system. And that right to choose and change is not given by politicians -- it is a God-given right -- but it was recognized by governments as a citizens' right at the beginning of the European Community system in 1951. Schuman and Adenauer were aware that the Soviet Union would collapse before the end of the twentieth century.
Choosing the FORM of Democracy is the most Fundamental of all Fundamental political Rights. Not all forms are equal. Each nation, however, has the right to choose its own democratic system. Robert Schuman, the Father of Europe, recognized many different forms of democracy. Unusual for a Frenchman from Republican France, he observed pragmatically that some constitutional monarchies respect democratic practice more than some republican forms of governments. The choice, however, is up to the citizens of each country. The main mission of all is to make each more democratic and fair.
If that is the case for each Member State, then do Europeans have the right to choose how democracy is organized at a European level? Schuman said emphatically: Yes. Furthermore he put that right as one of the first, one of the most fundamental of rights, into the very first agreement of governments right at the beginning of the modern Europe. He got every minister at the Treaty signature ceremony to sign it. It was also presented to the public so that all the parliaments of the six founder States could ratify it. And so they did.
It is called the Great Charter of Europe. It was signed sixty years ago. Isn't it curious that that date was not celebrated by the Council of Ministers?
It was the sixtieth Birthday of the first meeting of the Council of Ministers.
Isn't it amazing that that date was not celebrated by the European Commission, the European Parliament, the Consultative Committee and the Court of Justice?
It was the sixtieth Anniversary of the governmental decision that brought them into existence as INDEPENDENT institutions. How forgetful they are! How ungrateful!
The Community is an act of faith in the solidarity of peoples and nations that are persuaded that the future holds no place for war amongst themselves and corruption that exploits their neighbours and themselves. The Great Charter fundamental right of being 'free to choose' assures the means to clean out corruption from oligarchic and cartel powers.
Maladministration can be addressed to the European Ombudsman. The following is my reaction to the inadequate excuses of the European Commission -- that is supposed to be the Guardian of the Treaties -- as to why they have not published the Great Charter or even the correct version of the Schuman Declaration. It is not just a matter for the European Ombudsman but for European citizens. It is their Great Charter. It is everyone's Fundamental Right that is being challenged and buried.
TO THE EUROPEAN OMBUDSMAN
Schuman Project
Ref: Ombudsman refs 1200/2010/RT and 663/2011/RT
Dear Ombudsman,
This is to clarify my dissatisfaction with the Commission's non-reply to the main issues for which I requested a response, together with lack of figures and details of hierarchical responsibility. I have already sent you a copy of my letter back to the Commission DG Communication (also included below).
1. NO financial figures were given about how much was spent on the Schuman Declaration activities in 2010, by which I mean directly relevant Schuman Declaration activities, not cocktails and publicising other people's activities. A comparable case was the 'Together since 1957' programme which had a logo. What activities had a '60 years of the Schuman Declaration' logo or equivalent? What was said, what was published, what was broadcast about how the Declaration and the treaty provided for a peace system that gives present citizens the longest period of peace in more than 2000 years of history?
2. The Commission DG says that the Commission will correct what it has till now wrongly called the FULL text of the Schuman Declaration. It has been clear for half a century it is not the FULL text. The present Commission has for more than a decade facsimile copies of the originals, as I pointed out. The Commission still has not said what it means by FULL text. This needs to be spelt out as it already has its own 'flexible' definition of 'full' -- equivalent to what normal people call 'abridged, uncorrected and incomplete'. I request the Ombudsman to ask for clarification from the Commission.
Nowadays, due to this persistent error of the Commission and other EU institutions, nearly every other private and public publication including school textbooks and academic material, as well as European organisations and political parties, now use the wrong version. How and when will the Commission make the corrections and will it give conferences about it? Will all the institutions signal it widely with a prolonged programme? This situation has arisen because of the wilful Commission action in publishing the inaccurate version, prolonged incompetence in not checking the readily available facsimiles and the authentic sources, and inertia and refusal to reply to many letters and correspondence from the public over the years pointing out the errors. How does it propose to clean up the errors in publications and on the Web?
3. I asked who was responsible for the outright refusal to celebrate the 60th Anniversary of the day the Founding Fathers called the 'true foundation of Europe'. The non-answer was 'it was not selected by the institutions.' ! This is an evasive circumlocution. I know, and you will be aware from the absence of even a press release, that it was not only NOT selected but the persons responsible deemed the true foundation of Europe should be ignored to such an extent no one should hear a whisper about it from the institutions. Why? and Who? The Ombudsman should also be aware that besides the daily televised press conferences, briefings on legal, political and other matters, the dozens of daily press releases, the Commission also publishes each Friday a 5 or 6 page 'Calendrier' (CLDR series) of the coming week. It includes all the meetings of the Commissioners for the coming week plus 'previsions' of the main events and meetings for the month. A competent staff instructed to provide diary and anniversary information must have been told by their political masters and mistresses to ignore and omit any mention of what should be the most important date for the existence of the Commission -- the day when governments signed it into existence in the treaty, 18 April 1951.
The circular answer from DG Communication is aimed at hiding political responsibility. It is gross mal-administration because the public, including the tax-payer, is not able to call to account through this anonymity those responsible for misuse of public funds and distorting political influence. Names should be named on money matters and no policy of hiding political responsibility for misleading propaganda should be countenanced by the Ombudsman. The silence and the blotting out of the historical facts about the 'true foundation of Europe ' contrasts starkly with the millions spent subsidizing and campaigning for the false 'Birthday' of 1957 -- a pure fiction, subscribed to by none of the Founding Fathers. A bureaucracy should not be allowed to cloak what is politically or administratively embarrassing on such a serious matter as multimillion euro budgets and public education about European democracy. In this case the political action aims at hiding the legally agreed Human Rights of citizens recognized at the time of the foundation of Europe by (a) Member States (b) the European institutions about to be created and set in action as European governance. Furthermore who, might I ask, was responsible for spending 4 million euros and possibly much more on false propaganda about 'Together since 1957'?
4. The same goes even more for the Charter Declaration on Europe by the Founding fathers. What is the Commission's plan to correct this omission in publications, on the Web and also in the legal databases? How is it planning to make citizens aware that the 'right to choose' about Europe's organisation is fundamental and that the Founding Fathers considered that supranational democracy was the TRUE FOUNDATION of Europe rather than the present deformation of the system (intergovernmentalism)?
5. There are urgent and far-reaching reasons that the 1951 Great Charter should be published widely and be the primary and key part of the legal corpus of the Communities and the present EU. Some of these reasons are given in my letter to DG Communication. The right of citizens enshrined in the Charter goes beyond the 54 'fundamental rights' of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the Lisbon Treaty. In articles 53 and 54 of the latter it is clear that earlier rights such as specified in the Founding fathers' Great Charter are not abrogated in any way. One of the rights in the Great Charter is more fundamental that any of the 'fundamental rights' of the Lisbon Charter of Fundamental Rights. The Great Charter gives all citizens the right to choose how Europe should be organised democratically, describes the initial 5-institution framework to be developed and says it can inspire democratic impulsions beyond its frontiers as a totally new type of foreign policy. It specifies that systems such as the People's Democracies of the Soviet era are not acceptable as Member States of the Communities or the EU. This exclusion requires and provides the means to define democracy more accurately than it is being used nowadays and refine the Community system to make it develop more fairly in the future. The publication of the Great Charter and its legal use are therefore of major importance both for the Courts and for the Ombudsman.
The 1951 Great Charter is a legal document at the heart of European Community and EU law, so defined by Robert Schuman in his writings and the other Founding Fathers. The 1951 Great Charter is a concomitant part of the Treaty of Paris, signed by governments and ratified by all 11 chambers of parliaments in the Six Member States plus a number of other bodies such as economic and social committees of Member States. Like all treaties, all charters and all laws, it obliges the signatory powers and all others affected by it to publish it so that it may be fully applied. In the last paragraph the Charter as a legal document says succinctly:
- that all governments have a public responsibility to interact, explain and interpret in their national contexts,
- that all parliaments and other organisations should be actively participating in public debates to elucidate the supranational democratic principles involved and
- that the European institutions must have the support of public opinion for their functioning and be willing to interact fully within the agreed structures as their service to Europeans for peace and prosperity.
Many thanks again for your service.
Yours etc,
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