The wife, Gabriela Birsan is an appeals court judge in Romania and is under investigation for alleged corruption-- air tickets and jewellery in exchange for verdicts. See my Oct 17 post for details. Last week the Birsan claim for immunity from police searches of their home was rejected by Romanian magistrates. Now the ECHR itself has now come out and said that Mrs Birsan should be allowed the benefit of the immunity her husband has as a member of the court. According to a statement released by the ECHR -- you can the full statement on the court's website -- 'The Court is concerned that in carrying out a search in the home of the Romanian judgeas part of an inquiry conceerning allegations about his wife the rules on immunity may not have been respected.' The Strasbourg judges want the Romanian government to indicate 'whether they have grounds for asking the court to waive the judge's immunity.' In other words, before the Romanian cops raided the home of an allegedly corrupt appeals court judge, the Romanian government was supposed to ask her husband and his colleagues at the ECHR if the police could please carry out the raid --- giving, I dunno, how many weeks warning to Mrs Birsan that the police were after her hard-drive and jewellery collection? According to EUobserver, if the ECHR is proved right the whole case against Mrs Birsan may be dropped. Not that in Romania one would notice one more allegedly-corrupt member of the justice system still in office.... 21 October 2011 7:11 PM Update from the eurozone finance ministers' meeting: it's 7.15 pm Brussels time and one of the Dutch finance minister's' staffers has just walked through with a stack of pizza boxes for his colleagues: that's the usual sign it is going to be an all-nighter. (However, you can forget about the finance ministers sending out for pizza. Life is rather better than that in the guarded upper floors here in the Justus Lipsius building.) As things are shaping up in the wrestling between the Germans and the French, word is the Dutch and the Finns are backing the German plans while the Portuguese, Italians and Spanish are backing the French. Roughly the difference in plans is that the Germans don't want to put their taxpayers on the hook for any more than they have to in this endless bailout and looming bank recapitalisation (maybe €100bn), while the French want a 'European' solution -- ie, Sarkozy doesn't want to agree to any kind of a settlement that would make individual countries responsible for recapitalising their banks. That would increase French debt ferociously and thereby threaten France's triple-A credit rating, and with the presidential election coming up, everything Sarkozy is proposing in this debt crisis is geared to keeping that credit rating safe until after the elections in April. What the French president wants instead for the ECB and the bail-out fund to be ramped up into vehicles for insuring or buying sovereign bonds. But you may not want to know about all that. It gets a bit anorak. If it gets much more fraught in the negotiations, Europe might be looking for a new Peace of Augsburg before it gets a chance to look for a new eurozone treaty. When I say 'eurozone leaders,' what I mean is the German Chancellor and the French President. Either those two agree or nothing will happen -- or, well, no. Actually, plenty will happen, but it will all be in the markets and the sell-offs will be far beyond the control of anyone here in the European Council building this weekend. This summit-- today it is the eurozone finance ministers meeting, tomorrow the full 27 EU finance ministers, and on Sunday the EU heads of state and government -- has been trailed for weeks as the moment when, yessiree, the leaders of the EU are really, finally going to get to grips with the Greek problem. Except rather a lot of us now sitting in the press room were here in May 2010 when bleary-eyed EU heavies came down at 2 a.m. to tell us waiting journos they had finally, really got to grips with the Greek problem. (Actually the only solution to the Greek problem is the Arkansas fishing technique: light a stick of dynamite and throw it in the lake. For dynamite, read 80 percent default on all that Greek debt and stand back.) Also this weekend we are meant to believe there is going to be an agreement on the whole eurozone debt issue and bank recapitalisation and a fatter bailout fund, and agreement on more powerful central control of eurozone member states' fiscal policy. Or not. Yesterday the EU bosses announced that there is going to be another summit on Wednesday at which they will really, finally come to an agreement. Except I've noticed at least one diplomat who has already put his plans for next weekend on hold, as well as writing off Wednesday night, and at least one seasoned Brussels journalist who is already cursing the loss of his Ryanair flights to Italy next weekend: all of us have been over this course too often to believe the same pack of fumblers is ever actually going to figure out what to do about this mess. And it is a mess, even the insiders will say that, though not on the record. All Official Brussels will talk about is a 'comprehensive agreement.' Shut the door and turn off the tape recorder and what at least one well-connected official will say is that 'It's a mess. It is an absolute mess. It is clear no progress has been made on this.' So expect a 'comprehensive agreement' on Wednesday that falls apart as quickly as the'comprehensive agreement' reached by this same pack of fumblers on July 21st. Me, I'm not booking any Ryanair flights for the first half of December..... And on a Monday morning, too. The press corps plonked themselves down in the press room today, ready for the regular midday briefing: you know, announcements by the spokesmen for the commissioners covering banking, competition, foreign affairs, that sort of thing. Not today. The commission spokesman said we would be watching a film about waste. Before the press corps could make an escape -- well, before I could make an escape, can't speak for the others, maybe they like being treated like schoolboys -- the lights dimmed and this came up on the screen: The reaction? It was like being in a roomful of stunned mullets -- I think it took the press pack a few moments to absorb the full horror of the sub-Frankie Valli sound track ('...when you buy buy baby.'). The spokesman asked, 'Any questions?' A long pause, and then there was just one, from some environmental-type reporter asking if there were any commission plans to punish people who waste. Err, what, like the people who waste money making films such as this? End of today's midday press briefing. PS I now have the figure for the cost of the film: €192,080 (£167,557). As I said: Arghhh. Gabriela Barsan is under investigation for alleged corruption -- said to include receiving jewellery, airplane tickets and expensive restaurant dinners -- in exchange for favourable verdicts. But her husband now claims that the search of their home by prosecutors, and the seizure of his wife's computer and documents, violated the Vienna Convention. Nice try, yer honours. Apparently Romania's magistrate council said diplomatic immunity cannot be used to hamper the course of justice; a final decision on whether or not the two Barsans can claim immunity or not will be taken tomorrow, Tuesday. Euro-Parliament opens its own propaganda centre: and you're paying for it So, how many multi-millions of taxpayers' money has gone into this thing? The parliament's press people admit £18m has been spent on it, but with the book-keeping standards in EU institutions, the real amount is any body's guess. Besides being a vanity project for MEPs, the thing is also is a way for the EU institutions to brainwash school children, who are invited to come in groups to join a 'multi-modal role play game' in which they can take on the role of an MEP and go through all the steps need to approve a new European law. Yes, laws come from Europe, not from Westminster anymore, but I'd hardly take a British child on a holiday to Brussels to celebrate that disaster. Take him instead to the House of Commons and let him lay a wreath. But it's worse than that: consider what kind of exhibitions the children will be herded past on their way to the '360 degree digital projection' of the parliament's plenary chamber. Most revolting is a long dark corridor with a line of illuminated pictures which are part of a 'journey through time.' Run an 8-year old child past those and he will come out at the end imagining -- and that appears to be the purpose --that before the European institutions set up shop, the countries of the European continent could be nothing but a rubble-strewn wasteland. Examples: just one picture illustrates Italy in the early 20th century, and that shows Mussolini's march on Rome. The Netherlands in 1949: a grim border post, with nearby propaganda insisting that 'transport across Europe was very complicated and had to overcome various bureaucratic obstacles.' Amazing: this is an EU institution tut-tutting bureaucratic obstacles. Go ask the first small businessman you kind find about just what sort of bureaucratic obstacles the EU now puts up to him getting on and doing is business anywhere, much less across borders. Then Poland gets two pictures to illustrate its history. First picture, 1939, Nazis. Second picture, 1943, more Nazis. Spain, 1939, gets a picture of Republican forces who were defeated by Franco. But the parliament spares the Republican forces any mention of their Soviet communist backing. The United Kingdom finally gets a mention on this history wall, and this ought to frighten the wits out of any 8-year old you might be foolish enough to take to this place: London, 1941, shows children at Cosway School sitting in class wearing gas masks while a recording repeats over and over again: 'What in concrete and practical terms does the independence of nations mean in the world of today, a world of the closest economic and political interdepenence, which means the destiny of all mankind is indivisible.' Berlin, 1948: a picture showing 'poverty and hunger.' Then -- hallelujah, which is the response we are supposed to have since what we are dealing with here is a temple dedicated to the cult of Europe -- a picture of a European Movement gathering in Brussels in 1949, 'a mass gathering in support of European unification.' I looked pretty close but I couldn't see any acknowledgement that through the 1950s and into the 1960s, the European Movement was secretly financed by the CIA as part of its Cold War strategy against the Soviet bloc (hat tip as ever to Booker and North's The Great Deception for that research). Nor indeed was there any mention that I could find, because the Stuttgart firm that designed this exhibition -- or rather, designed at your expense, 'a dynamic sequence of individual environments,' likes spotlights coming out of the darkness, resulting in some of the most unpleasant and hard-too-see 'individual environments' you could imagine. Sorry, I started to say, there was no mention that I could find of the way the Marshall Plan money from the United States taxpayers turned that rubble of Germany into the industrial giant of the 1960s. Airlift, Marshall Plan, and on and on: you'd think the MEPs would at least find a spot in the 'dynamic sequence of individual environments' to put up a poster saying, 'Thank you, Uncle Sam.' And on it goes, but I will end with just one more example of the way the EU institutions such as the European Parliament try to twist everything good in any of the dozens of countries scattered across the European continent into a product of 'Europe.' One room in the exhibition has a floor with a 200 sq m map of Europe -- for you Anglo-Saxons who are actually paying for a big chunk of this thing, that is 240 sq yds. The visitor pushes around a big battery-powered toy that is the size of a dustbin. He stops the dustbin on any one of a number of cities, and the screen in the top of the dustbin tells him what 'Europe' has done for that city. Brace yourself, Edinburgh. For a start, the city is called 'Edinburgh in the United Kingdom' which will be a bit startling for any Scots visitors. Then the voice -- choose any one of 23 languages -- tells you that Edinburgh 'is where JK Rowling wrote the first Harry Potter books. Harry Potter is one of Europe's best known and well-loved stories. The stories belong to all of us.' Then the voice asks the visitor to think of 'the stories you loved' as a child, and asks 'do you know where they were written? Chances are they were written in another European language you didn't understand.' Then the voice assures you the EU 'is getting more and more wonderful books translated.' Okay, I'll play that game: the Old Mother Westwind Stories, Mistress Masham's Repose, Nancy Drew mystery stories, Sherlock Holmes, Winnie the Pooh, Dr Seuss, Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare, Ivanhoe, anything by Mark Twain, (confession: not Alice in Wonderland, it was weird), Edgar Allan Poe, Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities...so, now you mention it, Fritz or whoever it is who put his voice in that dustbin, I can't think of a single story I liked as a child that had to be translated from a European language. Oh, and if you really think JK Rowlings stories belong 'to all of us,' you just try infringing the Harry Potter copyright and see how fast you end up in an Anglo-Saxon law court. 
22 October 2011 11:47 AM
Update: human rights court may protect allegedly-corrupt Romanian judge from prosecution
Lutherans vs Catholics: seems like old times in Europe
A 'comprehensive eurozone agreement?' Give it six weeks, max
Arghhhh! EU spends your money on singing shopping bags
Sunday, 23 October 2011
Here's an update on that story about Corneliu Birsan, the Romanian judge on the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) who has been trying to get diplomatic immunity from criminal prosecution for his wife. It comes from EUobserver.com.
However, think about this. What with all the propaganda being pumped
out that the EU has guaranteed peace in European for 60 years, what I see shaping up in this dispute over how to solve the eurozone debt crisis is Lutherans vs Catholics, a financial version of the Thirty Years War.
It is a summit weekend here in Brussels, at which the EU leaders will yet again fail to find any way out of the disaster to which this single currency has led the 17 countries of the eurozone. (That is the Justus Lipsius building on the left, where the meetings take place.)
Hat tip to EUobserver for spotting this one: Corneliu Barson, the Romanian judge at the European Court of Human Rights -- that's the court that is so keen to interfere in British justice that they've even ordered the Government to give convicted foreign murders the right to have a family life in Britain -- has claimed diplomatic immunity for his wife, who is a judge at Romania's top appeals court.
Today was the first open day of the new 'Parlamentarium' at the European Parliament here in Brussels. The thing is billed as a visitors' centre, but in fact it is a propaganda centre, a multi-million pound way for the MEPs to stroke their own egos.
Nor, for example, was there any mention that the 'poverty and hunger' in Berlin in that 1948
picture was caused, not by 'not enough Europe,' but by too much Soviet aggression. The Soviet communists blockaded Berlin, and the only thing that kept the people of Berlin alive was the Berlin Airlift, led by the Royal Air Force and the US Air Force and other allied forces -- all of them from countries which the 'Europeans' of today dismiss as 'Anglo-Saxon.'
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