A bunch of cynics
J. Ignacio Torreblanca
February 5, 2007
On December 7th, 2005, Condoleezza Rice had a really friendly dinner with European foreign ministers. According to the revelations of Spanish Daily El Pais (26/01/2007), who had access to the minutes of the meeting, the US Secretary of State admitted the accusations that the US government was using the European soil and airspace to move detainees illegally captured in Europe and other countries back and forth from Guantánamo to secret CIA prisons all over the world [We know today that the CIA operated at least 1,000 flights and that at least 10 persons were kidnapped in Europe and transferred to third countries in order to be tortured].
At the meeting, Rice asked European foreign ministers to be understanding about the special conditions imposed by the US “war on terror”. She went even further when she specifically asked her colleagues “to show courage to confront the media, which is trying to condition European public opinion against the US”. Guess what the foreign ministers did? Fortunately for European decency, the Foreign Ministers of Norway, Denmark, Belgium and Portugal condemned US approach to human rights and expressed their concern that their countries were being used for those purposes.
Unfortunately, decency was not the majoritarian position. Among the “new Europe” countries, the British Foreign Secretary justified US practices, immediately followed by the Czech, who argued in favour of flexibility to combat terrorism. But the most interesting were the French Minister, who recognized that the world was confronting a new type of war and expressed his satisfaction about US-French anti-terrorist cooperation; and the German Foreign Minister, Steinmeier (Socialist and former main foreign advisor of Schröder!) who said he was “very happy” with the explanations offered by Rice.
There is only one good thing coming out of this regrettable story, which is what I moved me to write this post. Due to the investigations of the press, the European Parliament and the Council of Europe, the European public sphere is consolidating. An European public sphere simply means that we are all arguing about the same issues, that we have a common agenda about things which worry us. True, it is still incipient, because national courts and national parliaments are asking national governments what they did, what did they know and when did they know it. Yet, the European Commission and the European Parliament are having a key role in keeping action and debate alive. Ideally, at some point, we might see the sanctions envisaged by the EU Treaties being applied to member states failing to cooperate or admitting having had secret prisons,
There is no roadmap or handbook explaining what a “supranational democracy” is. We will discover it case by case. In this case, we are experimenting with an issue which is key for any democracy: how to hold elected representatives accountable for their actions. The fact that Foreign Ministers (such as the Spanish) went to the European Parliament to explain the position of Spain in this particular issue is a good sign of how democracy at the European level is evolving. Revealingly, no Foreign Minister has hidden behind national sovereignty in order to justify their refusal to cooperate. They simply can’t. This says something about the strength and depth of our process of political integration and the direction we should continue move on to.
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Dear Jose Ignacio:
I cannot be as optimistic as you. Just four data:
1º) Accordingly with EL Pais, John Bellinger, Condoleezza Rice’ legal adviser has said that CIA has not made any detention in Europe without Governments’ authorisation. He also has admitted that there has been secret CIA flights from 2001 stopping in Europe and that there has been also detentions. So it seems that all European governments (both, those that now condemn those flights and those that justify them) did know about these flights.
2º) The only person that, up to now, has resigned from his post due to this human right’s scandal has been (even if “officially” he has left for “personal reasons”), as far as I know, is Gijs de Vries when, in my opinion, he did not have the powers to do anything about it, not even to oblige Member States to inform him. So not only the European Goverments are not cooperating in this area -not even saying the truth- but they have “sacrified” the only “innocent” person -lacking of any power to solve the situation- is this unacceptable scandal.
3º) We must welcomed that Fava report was adopted last Wednesday by European Parliament (382 votes) but we should not forget that 256 MP’s voted against and 74 abstentions. 330 MP’s looking the other way is, on my opinion, too many people.
4º) the “unofficial” visits of Spanish police to Guantanamo (as the ones of the French, German police…), without any judicial order, -where, in our case, it seems that they did not even interrogated Spanish citizens but Moroccan ones- sounds me as a “horrible joke” taking into account that European Union has been, meanwhile, reporting, as regards Guantanamo’s prisioners, the USA’s infringments with international humanitarian law and with full compliance with international human rights instruments.
Best regards,
María
Comment by María López-Contreras González — February 19, 2007 @ 9:36 pm