French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s expulsion of Roma people from France is utterly appalling. It is discriminatory and in breach of EU law. It also smacks of ethnic cleansing, not to mention reawakening memories of World War II atrocities. I and most other civilised Europeans wholeheartedly condemn Sarkozy’s actions.
Tellingly, when the European Parliament debated this matter earlier in the week not one of the MEPs from Sarkozy’s own political party, the UMP, took the floor.
Equally telling, in the midst of condemnation of Sarkozy from the all the centre-left parties in the European Parliament, Tory MEP Timothy Kirkhope asked MEPs to wait until the Commission made a formal ruling on the legality of the measures. “Then we can make an informed judgement based on all the facts and decide how to focus on better integration of the Roma people, rather than pre-emptively condemn a fellow Member State”.
I was truly shocked by this mealy-mouthed Conservative point of view. It therefore came as no surprise when the ECR – European Conservative and Reformists – Group, the majority of whose members are British Tories, abstained on this resolution which, amongst other things, deeply condemned the measures taken by the French authorities as well as by other Member States’ authorities targeting Roma and Travellers and providing for their expulsion, urging them to immediately suspend all expulsions of Roma while calling the Commission, the Council and Member States to intervene with the same request.
The resolution, voted in the plenary session of the European Parliament earlier today, was, in fact, carried with 337 MEPs in favour, 245 against and 51 (mainly ECR) abstentions. This shows that , fortunately for everyone living in the European Union, the majority of MEPs are reasonable people with strong humanitarian instincts.
I can’t share Mary’s ‘shock’ at the Conservatives’ ‘mealy mouthed’ attitude to this important issue. It has been many years since I expected anything but the worst from them. The comparisons made to ethnic cleansing and World War II are however completely accurate in my view.
The French government is not the only one engaged in this barbarity, Italy is doing much the same thing and the Czech government’s slowness to deal with Neo-Nazi groups attacking Roma people has been condemnable.
It prompts one to ask why on earth we choose to waste our resources in order to continue our political union with these disgraceful regimes and the question which should also be raised is the point of the EU Parliament if its resolutions are ignored? The French Immigration Minister Eric Besson said after the vote that there was ‘no question’ that his govenrment would comply with the resolution.
It seems that only the UK government actually bothers to comply with EU resolutions, treaties, etc.
This issue points out very clearly the democratic deficit of the EU and its upside down constitutional arrangements. The only reason there can possibly be for not accepting the supremacy of an elected Parliament in a democracy is if the Head of State holds the positon with an electoral mandate. This is not the case in the EU. President van Rompuy was not elected by the people so the Parliament should be the supreme authority. This is not the case though, it works for the unelected Commission, it does not make laws, it cannot be described as a legislature and although it votes on this and that and passes resolutions none of this makes much difference.
In the EU the tail wags the dog, the unelected Commission rules the elected Parliament. It would be a mistake to compare the Parliament to the British House of Lords, it is not that powerful, its role is more like that of the British Monarch; entitled to warn and advise but nothing else.
The EU Parliament can warn and advise against the mistreatment of Roma people and it can point out until it is blue in the face that the actions of France are both wrong and against EU law but it is unlikely that it will make any difference.
Some years ago I was in Vienna and a woman there was telling me what a splendid nation Austria is and how proud she was of Vienna and also how she regretted the presence of so many Gypsies. She said that it was nothing to do with racism, ‘of course’, it was just that the Gypsies did not bother to learn the language properly and would not integrate. I told her that I only agreed with the first part of her statement – Austria was a great country, the way they have convinced us that the Austrian Adolph Hitler was really a German was a brilliant national triumph. I tried to explain that her country had also done well to make us think that Mozart was Austrian even though his brirthplace, Salzburg was independent of Austria at the time but she (perhaps willfully) failed to grasp my point.
It is always satisfying to put down racists like that woman but it is worrying that there are so many of them about and it is toubling that they feel so free, as Sarkosy does, to express their bigotry so brasenly.