EU Document Transparency: the real Problem is Seventy years old!

Do politicians like transparency? Do cats like rain?

They prefer to stay inside, behind closed doors. 

Then they hide the papers.

The most important papers are in fact treaties that have been hidden for seventy years. 

Seventy years!

What should citizens do about it? 

Complain about missing papers? A treaty engaging governments to open government is some extraordinary piece of paper, like no other.

 "Access to Documents: what next?" That was the theme of the 15 November conference was organised on  by the European Ombudsman, Mrs Emily O'Reilly. 

The conference was told:

"The EU institutions are obliged to keep records of documents relevant to their work and any EU citizen can request to view them. This right is enshrined in EU law but Regulation 1049/2001 is now 20 years old. New technologies, as well as changing expectations about the transparency of public administrations, mean it is time to discuss the future of the EU’s access to documents rules.

Transparency and access to documents inquiries account for around one quarter of the Ombudsman’s inquiries each year. There is a fixed timetable in the procedure for requesting documents, but are there too many delays in the system? While institutions have the right to refuse access to documents for certain specific reasons, are these exemptions applied too readily?"

Seventy Years of decline

The European institutions have been around for 70 years since the Treaty of Paris was signed on 18 April 1951. That treaty had a very powerful way both to collect information about the first European Single Market. It also knew how to protect the privacy of enterprises, the trade unions and the consumers. 

Schuman was no dreamer about bureaucracies. He wrote that a badly run bureaucracy, a technocracy was the greatest danger to democracy. How do you fight an out-of-control technocracy? Transparency. He therefore built in protection of information and information sources and also provided the means to make the most important information available to the citizens.

When the United Nations wanted to organise its global information network, it called on Schuman to write a plan for them.

So why is the Democratic Deficit and maladministration such a problem today?

Blocked at Birth

Let's be clear about the origin of this problem. Let's also understand why the office of Ombudsman was invented four decades after the birth of the European Community.

The European Community was designed as an open democratic system: 

• the Assembly was to hold open debates, 
• the Consultative Committees and, 
• Yes, the Council of Ministers too! 

Everything was supposed to be open to the public and the press. The principles were clearly written in the original treaties signed and sealed on 18 April 1951. 

Declaration of Interdependence

The key document was the Charter of the Community. It described how all citizens and civil organisations have the right to demand open government so that they can see, investigate and criticise each and every institution. This contrasted them with the so-called People's Democracies of the Soviet bloc. There the politburo met behind closed doors, issued its laws, stopped citizens from criticising the Party and forbade any other ideology but atheistic Communism. 

The Charter Treaty is the key document focusing on the right that will stop the EU becoming the European equivalent of the Soviet-style People's Democracy run by a politburo.

What distinguishes an autocracy from a democracy? The citizens' right to choose. With this power they can replace the so-called representatives who preferred to act as self-serving autocrats. 

The first act of the politicians was to hide or bury the Charter of the Community! This treaty was originally called the Joint Declaration of the European Community. Robert Schuman called it the Charter of the Community. It has also been called the Declaration of Inter-Dependence, reflecting the founding freedoms of the United States of America. 

The Commission has promised many times to publish this and the founding documents. It failed to deliver. Their original reluctance to publish it has led to the slippery slope of the Democratic Deficit. That has got worse and worse as one error was compounded by subsequent political compromises, not to say corruption.  

Consequences

Without the Charter and the applications of its principles, the European Commission became what Mrs Thatcher called in 1990 "an undemocratic politburo." This was just after the liberation of the Central and Eastern Europe from the Soviet Bloc. 'We are trying to get Eastern Europe to accept democratic standards and here we are recreating our own politburo,' she said. 

She was not alone, either in the UK or on the Continent.  

Generations of European democrats would not abandon the fundamental principles of impartiality and transparency. 

They made sure that it was written down -- even in the politicians' own Lisbon Treaty. Its articles say that meetings on the Council should be as open as those in the European Parliament. 

That still has not happened.

The doors of the Council of Ministers are slammed shut to the public and the press. 

The Law says politicians have to agree to open sessions whenever they

• consider
• deliberate, or
• take a common position of legislation proposed by the European Commission. 

That means practically all the time except possibly for discussions on security.

How will they be opened again? All the politicians in the Council have to agree that they should obey the treaty they signed up for.

Politicians are as difficult to herd as a clutter of cats.  But it takes only one brave, honest politician to declare and insist that the ministers have to obey the Treaty and act to open the doors.  

But even before the Lisbon Treaty, the Democratic Deficit and the closed door autocracy of the Council had stoked public frustrations, not to mention fury. What would the politicians do about it? How could they divert public opinion?

By the year 2000, the European Community system had been blatantly deformed into a politicians' cartel. People openly complained that the Commission was developing characteristics of Soviet politburo secrecy. The newly liberated countries of central and eastern Europe wanted none of that. 

So the politicians instead of applying the original treaties, decided to borrow the idea of Ombudsman from the Scandinavian countries. This would give the complainants the illusion of access. It was a veneer to cover the real problem.  It limited citizen's intrusion into their political games.  It diverted their energy into a process of fighting the bureaucracy to release documents rather than giving citizens their proper powers.

Illusion, no substance. False promises of action to publish responsibly. And far from the original basis of open democracy, full public and press access to meetings.

The excuses

What of demands for the publication of the real documents of people power from 1951? The Commission has over the years come up with a long list of excuses. 

They denied knowledge of the Charter of the Community!

Figure that out. The Commission declares that it is 'Guardian of the Treaties'. How then does the Commission not know where the treaties are?

Here is the signature page of the Charter Treaty, the Joint Declaration, signed and sealed as part of the founding Treaty of Paris.

It is signed the same day as the European Coal and Steel Treaty with its other annexes and protocols. It is signed by the same plenipotentiary ministers of Germany, France, Italy, Luxembourg, with two ministers from Belgium and the Netherlands. 

Its powers are described in the early legal literature and books on the Community, including those of Robert Schuman, Paul Reuter (who drafted much of the treaties) and others like Walter Hallstein, later president of the European Economic community. 

The Commission said they could not find it in their archives! Of course not. The last article of the ECSC treaty says the originals are kept at the French Foreign Ministry in Paris. A decade ago I wrote and obtained a copy. Why couldn't the 'Guardian of the Treaties'? 

What sort of incompetence is that?

The time for excuses is over. The governments, all organised civil society and individuals including the Ombudsman should insist that citizens have their rights recognized by the politicians.

The Charter of the Community must be published in the Official Journal! 

     

Euro12: European Council defies Ombudsman over rigging of EU's Fiscal Pact

The European Ombudsman has strongly condemned the European Council for unscrupulously rigging the Irish referendum and parliamentary votes around the EU on the Fiscal Compact that controls the European economy. By withholding crucial documents, the European Council has deceived both the public and parliaments in Member States who passed the Pact as law. The Fiscal Compact is in reality an undemocratic Con-Trick. It violates basic principles of national and European democracy and law.

• How can parliaments judge whether the Pact is fair, if the European Council hides the facts?
• How can a referendum decide, if the European Council rigs the evidence?
• How can the public interrogate their parliamentary representatives if the flawed legal basis for taxation and expenditure is locked away in the Council’s safe?
• Can European institutions such as the Community’s civil service be exploited as a skivvy for the politicians’ own non-Community Pact?
• The euro violates rules for a Community monetary system. Dishonest book-keeping and fraud reduced the Euro’s real value by 75 percent. Politicians refused to follow the Founding Fathers’ supranational economic and monetary principles.

The Pact makes Council the supervisor of fraud! After the Ombudsman condemned the European Council’s maladministration, the same document was requested AGAIN. The European Council again defied the Ombudsman. It refused to provide the document. A further appeal was made to the Ombudsman, Emily O’Reilly, that the European Council should respect her judgements and basic democratic principles.  The Ombudsman metaphorically threw up her hands. She confessed that the Ombudsman could do nothing to make the European Council follow the rules except the European Court of Justice.

She replied to me on 26 August 2014 that

‘I believe that a new inquiry into the Council’s recent refusal of disclosure would be repetitive, since there is no new element that would distinguish the new case of the one which I already inquired into. Moreover, the follow-up mentioned above (where the European Council again reiterated its own position) shows that the Council has no intention to change its position in this regard. It follows that a new inquiry into the same matters would, in all likelihood, lead to a new critical remark, which would neither be helpful to you, nor would trigger any positive follow-up from the Council.’

What is this crucial document? The European Council produced an analysis on the Pact’s flaws in terms of EU law. For European citizens it covered whether within the Pact they could take the Council and Commission to Court for abuse and criminality associated with it. That is a fundamental democratic right of all citizens. This key analysis is vital for understanding the basis on which the European Council is attempting to control the lives of 500 million citizens and multiple trillions of euros.

The document analyzing the insecure legal basis of the Fiscal Pact was circulated secretively to some EU delegations. It was never rendered public, in spite of national parliamentary debates and a referendum. Yet it is crucial for Europeans to protect the nascent European democracy that has been so abused by the European Council fraud in the past.

In this Pact the European Council gave itself unprecedented powers over national budgets and imposed controls and reviews on government spending. The measures were forced through national Parliaments. Some national leaders refused to sign up to the Fiscal Pact. Thus the Pact cannot be regarded as EU or Community law. At best it is an international agreement masquerading as European law. Obfuscation.

The Fiscal Pact measures are so radical and further distort the Community method for European democracy that referendums in all Member States should have been mandatory. Only one country, however, was able to force a referendum about this measure. That was Ireland. Its constitution requires such matters with major democratic consequences be subject to a vote. Other Member States railroaded the measure through their parliamentary system. A bare majority sufficed. There was minimal or no public debate about it. In Cyprus, which was hit by a euro banking disaster that shook the rickety foundations of the euro, it was passed simply by governmental Decree thus bypassing parliament.

The European Council’s imposition of the Fiscal Compact bypassed all the usual democratic control of the European system such as the European Parliament, the Economic and Social Committee and proper public debate. The European Council has consistently blocked the legally required elections for these bodies. In this case they just ignored them.

Are the Pact’s measures legal? Have Europeans lost their democratic rights? The Court has yet to pronounce.

Robert Schuman, the initiator of the European Community, defined democracy by the goals the European peoples define for themselves, not politicians. He said that all measures must be ‘in the service of Europeans and acting in agreement with the European peoples.‘ In this Pact, the people were left out of the loop in one of the most important measures in recent European history.

A key issue of this Pact is whether Europeans will be able to take legal action against politicians’ abuse or criminality spawned by these ‘closed door’ measures. Were the people consulted? No. Did they call for it? No. Did they agree? Hardly.

The European Council is acting to prevent democratic control of its new powers. Specifically it has thumbed its nose at the Ombudsman in refusing to release documents of primary interest. It did the same to the citizen who pay their salaries and the cost of the legal document in question.

Who are these people who are refusing democratic control over taxpayers money?

The Fiscal Compact was brought in because of corruption of politicians who not only overspent their countries’ budget, but used national budgets in voter bribes to sections of the public while giving ‘tax breaks’ to party supporters. Then they cooked the books. The national statistics were bent, twisted and contorted to cover the fraudulent activity.

If this had happened in a commercial company the perpetrators would now be in prison.

But they are politicians. Now they have a Pact that puts them in the judge’s seat.

Circus1: Commissioners leave Commission to be elected to Parliament, to then resign, in order to become Commissioners again! Illegal Nonsense!

What a tangled web of moral corruption and irrational nonsense the political class has got itself into trying to defend political nepotism! Seven Commissioners have declared they will take leave of the Commission and stand or support parties for the European Parliament. Why? To be active in Parliament? Not at all! They
want to be re-assigned to the Commission!

Then we have the European Parliamentarians demanding that the present President of Parliament resign!

Why? Doesn’t he want to stand again in the May 2014 elections again? Yes he does. But he wants to resign once elected to become the President of the Commission !!

Then we have a former prime minister of Luxembourg who the voters rejected at the polls. He too wishes to become the President of the Commission. What is he doing about it? He has put his name forward for the European Popular Party group for the European Parliament elections. He too will resign if ‘successful’ to become the President of the Commission!! Famously he was chairman of the ultra-secret Euro-Group that controls the major finance of the euro catastrophe.  He said several times to journalists that he has to lie to defend the euro! Is he to use the same principles to defend the Politburo politics of the Commission — which is supposed to be impartial?

Have they also taken leave of their senses? The European Commission, the Council and the European Parliament were set up as INDEPENDENT institutions. It makes as much sense for Commissioners to leave to get elected in their national parliaments.

How can members of the Commission be independent and impartial by wanting to be part of another institution?

Then comical becomes farcical. As soon as they are elected they will resign!

It gets more ridiculous! The body they chose to be active for, the European Parliament, should completely disqualify them from any post in the Commission. Its main function is PARTISAN, to represent, analyse and support partisan interests.

It is nonsense! The Parliament is a representative body. So is the Council. But the Commission is different. It is supposed to be impartial and an honest broker for all Europeans. It is supposed to embody supranational values, like fairness, honesty and impartiality. It is not a political secretariat for the governments. It articulates the common good beyond political parties.

If you don’t think this is an absolute farce, consider the next step.

Being elected to the European Parliament or not, taking leave of absence from the Commission or not, even resigning or not, has nothing to do with if they will make it to the European Commission for 2015.
No, the people who really decide who will be in the Commission, will decide who this is to be, regardless of all this leave-election-resignation circus. The European Council behind closed doors will do as they have done in the past. They will pick a politician (yes they always choose one of their own) in complete secrecy.

They are responsible to no one. Their whole aim is to reinforce political nepotism. They always choose a member of the main political parties. They thumb their nose at anybody among the EU’s 500 million people who is not a member of their club — even though the treaties say it is ILLEGAL to choose a politician active in his party. They can chose a person who was never in the Commission or the Parliament.
So this political circus, this political theatre, is only there for one purpose. It is to distract the public, the audience, while the government ministers politically pick the pockets of the public.

This process is not only illegal but highly detrimental to democracy. The European Commission is especially important in the Community system as it was designated as being totally IMPARTIAL from any government, political group or business, trades union or consumer interests. It is there to represent the common interests of ALL citizens without any exception. Beyond them it is supposed to be able to propose what is right and just for our children in the future. Children don’t vote!

That role has been written in the treaties since 1951 and the founding Treaty of Paris. It is still is in the Lisbon Treaties verbatim. What does any rational member of the public understand when the Lisbon treaty says:

‘the members of the Commission may not during their term of office engage in any other occupation, whether gainful or not.’

What is party political activity? Clearly membership of political parties is in violation of this article. It is an occupation which previously brought in a lot of money. Would you expect a businessman to retain his business while working as Commission President? Some Commissioners believe that their continued membership of a political party will again bring them a lot of money when they leave the Commission — either for government office again or some other activity dominated by party or governmental networks.
Governments do not like a body that must be honest and fair. This is especially the case if crooked deals are being cooked up in the Council of Ministers. So bit by bit they government ministers insisted that Commissioners could be politicians. Then they went further. Today all Commissioners are politicians! Now they say ONLY politicians can be members of the Commission. That contrasts with the early Commission when there were none!

Clearly party political membership is partisan. An independent, impartial honest person would shun any activity that impugned his or her reputation of impartiality. Would a judge who was involved in a corruption case involving billions of public money being misused go off and discuss who-knows-what in private and dine with the very people up before the Court?

Today a large group of governments — nearly all of them — are known to be guilty of fraudulently fixing statistics for the euro, spending money to bribe voters and hoping that rich members of the EU will bail them out. The Commission is now expected to act as judge to see twice a year that the national budgets are properly managed. So any member of the public would expect extra care for choosing every and all Commissioners. They should distance themselves from party operations which lay at the faulty construction of the euro.

What happens in practice? The Commissioners travel Europe and attend party political conferences. And astoundingly they bring with them their personal staff and ‘their’ civil servants. All are paid at the taxpayers’ expense! No voter in the European Union agreed that.

According to this Treaty article the Commissioners are not allowed to have an occupation as party politicians. They must resign from any party they formerly adhered to. Why? The Founding Fathers are clear. To show their independence.

Can you be independent and a member of a political party? Clearly not. The word partisan — adhering to a party as distinct from the common interest — shows the two occupations are at loggerheads.

Now we have the spectacle of 7 Commissioners standing for Parliament!  Is the job of European parliamentarian a gainful one? I should say so.

Why this circus? Nowhere do the present Lisbon Treaties say that the Commission should be chosen from politicians elected to the European Parliament. It merely says in Article 17 TEU that the Commission should be named by the governments after the results of the elections are known.

‘Taking into account the elections to the European Parliament and after having held the appropriate consultations, the European Council, acting by a qualified majority, shall propose to the European Parliament a candidate for President of the European Commission.’

This is not an invitation for politicians in government to nominate their buddies or their political enemies they wanted to send far away to Brussels!

The governments are to put forward candidates who have proven impartiality. The public can then examine their record. This is the principle established at the beginning of the Community process. Several candidates were refused because they were seen by others to be too partisan, too nationalistic or representing special interests.

Nowhere does any treaty say that the governments — who are one and all composed of party politicians — should nominate someone appointed by their party machines to be a candidate. That is electoral fraud. Political nepotism will only act as further lead weight to lower public trust and confidence in politicians. The Lisbon Treaty TEU article 10) in fact says that

‘ALL citizens have the right to participate in the democratic life of the Union.  Decisions shall be taken as openly as possible.’

Decisions are not taken openly as to who can be the Commission candidate because the governments have so far refused to implement such a system. It requires the public to choose who is impartial. The party machines are sources of potential and actual corruption because they are the biggest Lobbies in Europe. How they make policy is usually cloaked in mystery. Who pulls their strings? In the past parties were paid for and controlled by cartels, trusts, or unions.

It might be worth asking how party machines chose their candidates, not only for this post but simply being an MEP. Too often, admitted one MEP, the party leader says: ‘You, you and you will be are our MEPs!’ That is the party list system. So much for democracy. Meanwhile the national governments put up a barrage of restrictions so that no individual free of such party political apparatchiks can stand as a candidate. The EU has 28 national elections. The treaty itself calls for ONE election with ONE statute for all the EU so that a citizen can vote for any person he or she wants to.

Then they nominate an out-of-work, or a failed politician to be the party candidate for the Commission! This is called parachuting. Only party members are allowed to be eligible for parachuting into the lucrative Brussels postings.

Only two percent of the population has membership of a political party. So that means 98 percent of the population is ruled out and eliminated by the political nepotism of the governments acting as a Politburo. They could offer non-political academics, professors of law or morals, diplomats, former leaders of NGOs.
Even those who formerly had experience in small business and know the hard realities of economics and were no longer running businesses would make good candidates.

Now who would make the best impartial, experienced members of the Commission? It would be someone who is experienced with the Brussels bureaucracy, fights corruption committed at the European level and has the interests of all citizens at heart.

Consider the European Ombudsman who fights mal-administration in the European institutions.

One of the biggest outrages of mal-administration today is just that. The present Ombudsman is not a member of a political party. But the Council’s Politburo rules make party membership their essential  factor of choice.

The experienced, non-partisan, impartial Ombudsman cannot become the President of the Commission. She is not a member of a political party!

What a circus! What egotistical corruption!

Euro11: Ombudsman condemns European Council cover-up on legality of euro's Fiscal Compact

Maladministration on a grand scale! Who controls multi-billion funds that dwarf the EU’s annual budget by three or four times? Who ultimately controls the multi-trillion stranglehold that the Brussels institutions have on the budgets of national governments in the EU?  Who controls the Bank? Why are such mega projects excluded from Court action for fraud and crimes that the euro crises have already exposed across the whole euro zone?

If you thought some fiddling by MEPs or even small States like Greece, Portugal, Cyprus or Ireland was of concern, take a stiff coffee before reading on.

The European Ombudsman, Emily O’Reilly, has condemned the European Council and its secretariat in the Council of Ministers of maladministration for a cover-up and refusal to provide promptly legal information for public discussion on the  Fiscal Compact Treaty controlling Europe’s multi-trillion euro economy. The documents, essential for a proper democratic debate and consultation were requested two years ago in January 2012.

In spite of the Ombudsman’s ruling, the documents in question have still not been provided.

The Fiscal Compact is an international treaty and has not been signed by two Member States. Both the Czech Republic and the United Kingdom refused. Its relationship to the EU justice system is therefore questionable. For the European Court to act all Member States must have the measures agreed by democratic vote in a European treaty of all Member States. Then all the European institutions have their right to discuss and amend the treaty. The Council, Parliament, Consultative Committees all elected by democratic vote have to have their imput and rights on individual decisions and measures undertaken. The Commission should have clear independence. It should not be treated like a skivvy or slave of the Council of Ministers. It is not their Secretariat! Then the European Court of the EU can make its judgements when their is a complaint from any citizen, organization or State.

Signatories of an international treaty conversely, for example, NATO or the Council of Europe, cannot ask the European Union’s Court of Justice in Luxembourg to make judgements for them.

So what is the status of the Fiscal Compact?

It spends nearly half of its many pages with a Preamble with many indents or tear-jerking appeals of its Europeanness: Conscious of this, Desiring that, Recalling this that and the other of European goals and even institutions. The truth is it is not a part of the European Union or the Community. It is a separate international treaty, fixed up by some politicians in a fix. They have used all the lawyers’ skills and deceits to give a facade that it is part of the European legal system, as best they can. But they can’t. There are two members missing and only treaties inside the Community system embracing all members are EU legal treaties.

How can outraged European citizens or duped Member States appeal if other States do not comply with the Compact’s strictures? What can anyone do if some politicians treat the other States as financial patsies? That is just what the monetary crises in Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Ireland and others are all about. The public’s conclusion is obvious. Some politicians are not honest, nor do they act honestly with the people’s money. Money deranges their judgement. They treat it as a slush fund to dole out to people they hope will vote for them. If they can’t get away with it at home or run out of money they tap into the prosperous countries that keep their books in order and have a surplus.

The full title of the Fiscal Compact is Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance in the Economic and Monetary Union. It tries to add additional bandages on the badly conceived and crisis-ridden Euro project.

The euro was made by politicians for politicians, hoping they would get away on a European scale with overspending and hidden financing they had all been doing since the 1970s. Then surprise, surprise, the public found out that the politicians cooked the books, not only in Greece but practically everywhere. In a commercial company that sort of duplicity and malpractice would have been considered criminal. But politicians say it is normal for them. They are only dealing with public money!

No wonder that the politicians’ main scam, the Euro, has experienced only 7 or 8 years of stability and convergent national bond interest rates.  That is a blink of an eye in the lifetime of a solid, stable currency. Why did interest rates explode again? It does not have solid monetary or democratic foundations.

The euro’s worth has fallen to a quarter or  fifth of what its value should be worth against stable stores of value. Its conception and management by the secretive EuroGroup, which is not an institution of the EU, flies in the face of any real Community democracy. A Community currency requires Community democratic control.

The other bandages that the Council politicians concocted in the privacy of their meetings, the European Stability Mechanism and the European Finance and Stability Facility with half a trillion euro and its Mechanism that leverages a few more billion from the EU budget. This created a company in Luxembourg to draw billions of loans and liabilities from international financial markets. Who is this money for? Why, the same States that are already seen as betraying the public’s trust in cooking the statistics and overspending their budgets. In other words the taxpayers will have to pay for any mismanagement in these operations too.

And what do we find in these treaties? Surprise, suprise! We find an assurance by the same politicians that anyone involved in these multi-billion operations, when seen to be obviously guilty of malpractice, is offered total legal immunity from prosecution!

Not only that no document will be available for public scrutiny. No document will be able to be controlled and judged by any court of law whatsoever! This is what the relevant article of the ESM says about its staff and their paper trail:

“ARTICLE 35
Immunities of persons
1. In the interest of the ESM, the Chairperson of the Board of Governors, Governors, alternate Governors, Directors, alternate Directors, as well as the Managing Director and other staff members shall be immune from legal proceedings with respect to acts performed by them in their official capacity and shall enjoy inviolability in respect of their official papers and documents. ”

Who are the governors? Why, the politicians! That is a paradise for crooks and crooked practice. It is an invitation to mega crisis.

The Background with my last commentary on this case can be found at Euro10.
The Ombudsman’s judgement on the Fiscal Compact cover-up can be found at
http://www.ombudsman.europa.eu/en/cases/decision.faces/en/53191/html.bookmark

Truth9 Mr Ombudsman: Where is Europe's Magna Carta, guaranteeing everyone's freedom to choose?

The European Ombudsman
COMPLAINT ABOUT MALADMINISTRATION
Against the European Commission


What is the decision or matter about which you complain? When did you become aware of it? Add annexes if necessary.

The complaint is about the continuing failure of European Institutions in particular the European Commission to publish the full text of the Schuman Declaration (and publishing an edited version as allegedly the Full Text) and refusal to publish the Charter of the Community of 18 April 1951. The full details of the complaint are in Complaint 1200/2010/ RT.

I have made numerous appeals, written and otherwise, over a period of two or three decades, including letters to the Commission President and other institutions. Some letters were also published on the Web on 30 November 2009. http://democracy.blogactiv.eu/2009/11/30/commission-debate18-open-letter-to-new-commission-on-europes-foundational-declaration-of-interdependence-and-supranational-democracy/ and http://www.schuman.info/truth7.htm

I am here replying to latest letter of the director general of the Commission’s Communication DG of 5 July 2010.

What do you consider that the EU institution or body has done wrong?

Following my earlier complaint, 1200/2010/RT, I would like to expose the fallacies in the response I have received from Commission Director General Mr Sørensen of the DG Communication. These answers seem to have been accepted at face value by the Ombudsman. I was not allowed to reply before the Ombudsman closed the case. Following the subsequent recommendation of the Ombudsman, I am therefore renewing my complaint.

The Commission is supposed to be guardian of the treaties. This function requires that the Commission have a clear understanding of what the treaties are, where they are kept and also how to discern the truth and veracity of documents. Unfortunately the Director General Sørensen makes some elementary mistakes in his reply. The officials do not know where to look for the original (which is clearly stated in the treaty) and they have chosen an archive that is obviously the wrong one. This would indicate that the Commission officials do not take their major public function seriously.

(1) The Director General says that he verified the Schuman Declaration with the University Institute of Florence. He need not have gone so far abroad; the answer is near at hand. It can easily be shown that the real Declaration is not the document at Florence, and that the problem document was presumably provided during the Monnet presidency of the High Authority. The Florence archive of Commission documents was only set up by Commission Decision in 1983. Officially it only deals with documents deposited since the European Coal and Steel Community started. Its archives started in 1952. The archive contains a dossier labeled the Schuman Declaration but obviously this does not contain the original of the Declaration. Nor does the archive contain important originals such as the Treaty of Paris, signed on 18 April 1951 or other foundational documents like the Charter of the Community (‘Europe Declaration of Interdependence’). These were apparently never in the Commission archive. (Monnet did not like the word supranational, the foundational, legal term for the Community. 'I do not like the word supranational and never fancied it.' Mémoires p 352.) At best the DG’s alleged Schuman Declaration used so frequently by the Commission and other institutions is a shortened copy introduced by the Monnet team who have been proved to be unreliable when it comes to historical fact.

(2) (a) Where is the original of the Schuman Declaration? The original Declaration is the text of the actual speech that Schuman made on 9 May 1950 in the Salon de l’Horloge of the Quai d’Orsay, the Foreign Ministry building in Paris. Where is it? As might be expected, it is deposited at the French Foreign Ministry archives. Is it a secret matter, kept out of public view? Possibly. However, the Commission has at hand an authentic copy of the original text. It is annotated with corrections in the handwriting of Robert Schuman. It contains the full text of the introduction that set the geopolitical context and describes the importance of the initiative. These vitally important paragraphs are always omitted from Commission publications. They are reproduced in colour facsimile in the book, ‘Un Changement d’Espérance’ published only in 2000 (fifty years after the event) by the Jean Monnet Foundation (JMF). A copy is to be found in the Central Library of the European Commission in Brussels. The book says that one copy of the important introductory paragraphs of the Declaration is to be found in the archives of the Jean Monnet Foundation, which also holds important private papers of Schuman. The last words are ‘Voici cette décision, avec les considérations qui l’ont inspirées.’ According to this book, Schuman’s corrected text of the rest of the Declaration is to be found at the French Foreign Ministry. It should be noted that the pages of the typescript are numbered and that page 3 starts with the phrase ‘La paix mondiale …’ (That is the part that the Commission uses with some changes on http://europa.eu/abc/symbols/9-may/decl_en.htm .) That page numbering would indicate the full text with Schuman’s corrections in his own hand is probably in the Ministry. The JMF copy of this first part of the Declaration is typed on a different typewriter and the book says that this is to be found at the JMF at Lausanne, Switzerland.

(2b) Mr Sørensen says that in 9 May 2010 celebrations a reconstitution of the Schuman Declaration took place at the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs as part of celebrations. He did not say if this and the ‘re-lecture of the Schuman Declaration’ at Paris included the full text. If not why not?

(2c) The list of events he supplies supposedly for the sixtieth anniversary of the Schuman Declaration includes many events having nothing to do with Schuman (Chopin, Nikowitz, cocktail parties and discussions of Gaullist ideas like ‘Franco-German engines’, which Schuman opposed. Why is the Commission spending money supporting anti-communautaire ideas? ) The letter fails to say how much money was spent directly on the Schuman Declaration celebrations (not Schumann Declaration as was written) compared with the fraudulent 50th Birthday campaign of 2007, called ‘Together since 1957’. That PR event, aimed unsuccessfully to try to make people like the Lisbon Treaty without its being published, was in total contradiction to the Community Charter. In the Charter the Founding Fathers declared that 18th April 1951 should be commemorated as the day creating ‘the true foundation of an organized Europe’ and Europeans should be free to choose.

3 (a) The French Foreign Ministry is also the Depository of the original text of the Treaty of Paris. According to Article 100 of the Treaty there is only one authentic copy and that is held in Paris. Certified copies of the Treaty are to be sent to Member States.

(3b) The French Foreign Ministry is presumably the legal Depository of the Charter of the Community, the Europe Declaration of Interdependence. This document is of primary importance as it represents a signed agreement of all the Founding Fathers, the plenipotentiaries of the Six. It defines the spirit and purpose of the European Community. However it is not clear whether the French Ministry sent copies of the Charter of the Community to Member States. It is hard or almost impossible to find. After Schuman left the Foreign Ministry it came under even stronger Gaullist control. The Charter is printed in books about the Treaty and is in newspapers of the time. This Charter is, by some considerations, more important than the treaty itself as it describes the principles on which Europe should unite, such as freedom of thought and the free and wholehearted action of the people. In it the Founding Fathers defined the federating principle for organizing Europe as supranational democracy. Schuman puts the Charter in the category of the Magna Carta for Europe.


What, in your view, should the institution or body do to put things right?

The European Commission has refused over decades to publish its foundational documents because presumably the documents insist that all treaties should be democratically agreed and not forced through against the wish of the people.

(1) The Commission should publish a full apology for not having published these documents in more than half a century (when de Gaulle took power). (2) The full text of the Schuman Declaration with the introduction and the corrections of Schuman should be published prominently with an explanation. (3) The Charter of the Community should be given major prominence and presented to the public by the Commission itself with a full explanation of what is meant by supranational democracy, how it provides the true foundation for Europe, how the five supranational institutions are to work together in this democratic system, which is ‘open to all European countries’ and where people are ‘free to choose’. (4) These documents should remain the major documents in all publications explaining the astonishing introduction of peace in Europe after more than 2000 years of continuous warfare and the creation of a true foundation for organizing Europe for works of peace.

Please treat my complaint publicly