Britannia Radio

14 October 2009 President Klaus Knows Exactly What He Is Doing   President Klaus of the Czech Republic has very good reason to see the Lisbon Treaty and its Charter of Fundamental Rights as a real and potentially catastrophic problem for his country.   When I and other MEPs were there last year we were shouted down in his parliament by socialist MEPs visiting from Germany who knew perfectly well how they intend to recover great swathes of the Czech Republic under the Charter of Fundamental Rights the moment Lisbon is ratified and in force. They can hardly wait.   We Brits have our own good reasons to encourage him to delay signing the Lisbon Treaty, but he has plenty of much stronger reasons of his own.   The Lisbon Treaty reactivates the residual issue of 3.5 million Sudetenland Germans who were made to leave what then became Czechoslovakia after the Second World War.  They are now seen as victims.   Nobody nowadays wants to admit that Hitler encouraged the Sudeten Germans to migrate there in the first place, after his unlawful annexation of the area in 1938.  Such a fundamentally embarrassing fact has been swept under carpet by the German-dominated EU.   The Brussels machine has tried to ignore the Sudeten issue, despite the undisputed fact that ratification of the Lisbon Treaty would put at risk up to a fifth of all Czech wealth and assets.   Specifically, the Charter of Fundamental Rights confers on all EU citizens equal rights before the law, and the right to appeal to the European Courts on grounds of discrimination, if they believe those rights to have been breached anywhere in the EU, regardless of their local nationality.   The German president of the European Parliament no less, Hans-Gert Pottering, told a meeting of the Sudeten German Territorial Association last year that every European citizen would have the right to appeal to the ECJ in Luxembourg against discrimination.  He did not mention access to the quite separate European Court of Human Rights, but he might just as well have done.    Pottering was saying that Germans forced out of Sudetenland are no longer barred from suing the Czech Republic for compensation and restitution for loss of property and other assets after WW2, despite the fact that such legal action is specifically forbidden under Czech law.     Last autumn, as a member of the European Parliament’s Constitutional Affairs Committee, I and a dozen or so other members visited Prague to meet ministers in the Czech government and a cross-section of parliamentarians.   It was an astonishing visit.  The conduct of some of my fellow MEPs, and their breath-taking arrogance and contempt for the sovereignty of the Czechs left me disbelieving my own ears at times.   Only Hannah Daul of Denmark and I were there as equals.  The rest of the delegation was federalist and totally committed to the European ‘dream’.  For them, Lisbon was the climax, and could be allowed to fail.  They had come to harangue, threaten, arm-twist, scorn if necessary.   Much of this account is taken from my contemporaneous notes.    The chairman of our committee, and also of our delegation, was the German socialist Jo Leinen, who attempted to take me aside before our round of meetings started and warn me off mentioning the Sudeten question.  Now who had told him that was my intention?  Someone must have told him I had been briefed before we left by several concerned Czech MEPs who were not on the committee.   He specifically said to me during that exchange that Lisbon would “not be applied retrospectively”.   This struck me as a very odd comment to make in the circumstances.   First, he was admitting a possibility of legal argument over the relevance of the CFR to the Sudeten problem.  Secondly he was directly contradicting what Pottering had told the Sudeten Germans only weeks earlier.  It was an admission of weakness.   The crisis moment over the Sudeten issue arose over lunch with the Senate – the Czech parliament’s upper house.    Doubting Senators expressed themselves clearly.  The British MEP Andrew Duff (who was so desperate to go that he paid his own way after being excluded from the delegation) introduced himself everywhere as a European federalist rather than a British lib-dim).  He applied blatant pressure.   At one point he called the Czech government “deluded” if they thought they could change Lisbon or hold the presidency of the European Council without signing.    He later took it upon himself to award the President of the Czech Republic no more than a Beta Minus for his submission to the Czech Constitutional Court on the options open to the country, and the potential conflict of interest, if he signed the Lisbon Treaty.      Duff’s behaviour and manner was an insulting, arrogant, unjustified, totalitarian application of pressure on a sovereign nation.  It was utterly disgraceful.    As usual in all our committee meetings, chairman Leinen tried to stop me speaking until the very end, hoping that would minimise the damage I might do.   However, I was preceded by a Senator who raised the Sudeten German issue.  I responded by agreeing that I thought his concerns were valid, and compared the Sudeten problem with the situation in Cyprus over Turkish seizure of Greek property 35 years ago.    Leinen went spare – and red in the face with rage.  He, and several other members of our delegation, quite literally tried to shout me down in a cacophony of noise.  When order was finally restored Leinen was extremely rude to the Senator, and to me as it happens.  The tension was measurable.    Afterwards one other of the Senators made a point of telling me that mine was the voice of sanity and the breath of fresh air they had all wanted to hear.  But he said it privately to me.  It was obvious he didn’t want to say it openly.    His quiet word in my ear suggested that pro-Lisbon factors in the Czech government had tried to discourage their Senators from raising the Sudeten question with our delegation.  In other words, the federalists on both sides had tried to snuff it out before we even began our meetings.   A leading Czech constitutional lawyer later assured us President Klaus could refuse to sign the Lisbon Treaty into law indefinitely.  He had a constitutional duty to do what was right for the country – a point Leinen rubbished later.   Leinen suggested the president was just a figurehead obliged to sign whatever the parliament decided.  He did not draw comparisons with the Queen although, deplorably, he could have done.   Next morning we were due to hold a press conference at the European Parliament’s Prague offices to discuss our visit.  Normally, all views on the political spectrum are given a place on the delegation panel.  But not this time.  Leinen hi-jacked it, saying he would speak solo “because there is no room” for the whole delegation.  Sudeten came up in a question which Leinen arrogantly dismissed.  There was no risk of Sudeten German restitution under the Charter of Fundamental Rights, he claimed, knowing perfectly well that he had no knowledge or authority to say any such thing.   When he had finished I then offered a contrary view from the floor.  Again he attempted to shout me down, and added that we had an ‘agreement’ that I would not speak – not true.  He then refused to allow the EP’s Prague offices to be used to record a contrary opinion.  So I mentioned freedom of speech rather loudly and invited the camera crews out into the street where I recorded a series of interviews.   I made two points:   Why would the German president of the European Parliament gratuitously tell a meeting of the Sudeten German Territorial Association, of all people, that every European citizen would have the right to appeal to the ECJ in Luxembourg against discrimination, if such a statement meant nothing?   Since the Sudeten Germans were now certain to try to bring a class action case under the Lisbon Treaty, having been directly encouraged by the German president of the European Parliament, the Czech Republic faced a potential claim which would cost them up to a fifth of the country’s entire wealth.  Ratifying the Lisbon Treaty, with the Charter of Fundamental rights included, was a potential catastrophe for the Czech people.   But it was also avoidable.  Just don’t sign.     PS: Several months later, as part of an exchange of correspondence with President Klaus, he mentioned to me that he had listened to the tapes of my discussing the Sudeten question at the lunch with the Czech Senators.  He knew exactly what had been said, and how the meeting had been reduced to complete disorder for a while.  And he knew why.   We can be sure President Klaus knows exactly what he is now doing, and why.  Be in no doubt.       To respond to, or comment on this Email, please email ashley.mote@btconnect.com Click www.ashleymote.co.uk to visit the site now.