Transparency in Europe gets Chinese makeover
October 29, 2008
Last week Hans-Gert Poeterring, the president of the European Parliament, awarded the parliament's top human rights prize to jailed Chinese dissident Hu Jia.
The Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, named after the Soviet scientist and dissident, has been awarded every year since 1988, when Nelson Mandela, the father of South African democracy, was the inaugural recipient.
To be expected, the Chinese government was irritated by this year's award. For reasons that have little to do with China, I was also irritated by it. As a matter of policy, it might be a good thing to keep China under pressure to improve its human rights; now that the Beijing Olympics has been consigned to history, there is not much opportunity to do so.
There'll be even less in the coming years, as governments across the globe look to China for help in the aftermath of the current financial crisis. So in a way, it is good that a powerful European player is prepared to challenge a more powerful world player.
My irritation was based on the belief that if the EU was sincere in its efforts to promote freedom of thought, it should have awarded the Sakharov prize to the brave members of the European Parliament (MEPs), who voted in April to release a secret report into the abuses of the European Parliament's generous allowance system.
Their efforts to secure even the most modest level of disclosure failed because they were outvoted by 442 MEPs who were keen to insure the public did not have insight into the workings of the EU gravy train. The report, based on an audit by the parliamentary committee on budgetary control, discussed a catalogue of abuses, but mentioned no MEP by name.
Despite this anonymity, it was kept under lock and key and could only be seen by MEPs who signed a confidentiality agreement. However details did leak, prompting pressure for some action.
That action was an EU parliamentary vote in which the very parliamentarians implicated by the report got to decide whether the report should be made public.
Not surprisingly, the overwhelming majority voted no.
Think Travelgate, magnified a thousandfold, and then consider how lucky we are in South Africa to have had the opportunity for so much talk on the subject. Not so for the hapless citizens of Europe, the vast majority of whom still have no inkling about the gravy train they are funding.
Or indeed, if not to the free-thinking MEPs who voted in a bid to promote open and accountable government, perhaps Poeterring could have awarded the prize to the motley crew of Irish campaigners who had been corralled behind barbed wire a week earlier in Brussels.
These brave and tireless campaigners were in Brussels to protest against demands that Ireland vote on the new EU constitution (aka the Lisbon Treaty) again … and again … and again presumably, until it gets the answer right, which, as far as the EU elite is concerned, is yes.
The Irish protesters, who had to get permission in advance to protest, were outnumbered by police who made sure they were unable to bother the bureaucrats and politicians who are increasingly unwilling to brook any interference from the citizens of Europe.
The reality is that while China is making steady but slow progress towards a more open and democratic society, the EU is moving slowly but steadily in the opposite direction.
Perhaps China could devise something like the Mao Zedong prize for promoting opacity in a large centralised government and award it to the EU parliament?
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