media reports:
...Human rights groups also staged protests in the Portuguese
capital against the presence of Robert Mugabe,
the Zimbabwean leader accused of rigging elections
and suppressing opposition groups.
Gordon Brown is boycotting the two-day summit because
of Mugabe's attendance, provoking widespread criticism
from other African leaders, and a rebuke from the
president of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso.
I'm no fan of Labour or Gordon Brown but on this
boycott they are surely right.
Initially I welcomed the UK's membership
of the then Common Market now EU and also
supported our adopting the Euro. Debate
both on Sharecrazy and with friends including
an FO civil servant has caused me since to be
agin the UK adopting the Euro currency.
The antics of the EC bureaucrats eg spending fortunes
and adding hugely to Carbon footprints of shifting
offices from Belgium to France every 5 minutes for
purely parochial reasons has made me less enthusiastic
about the EC. Mostly the ShareCrazies who have
sought to ridicule the EC Human Rights laws I have
disgreed with and still largely do.
However if the EC's laws on human rights are to
carry any moral weight then the EC should be
really alert to avoid giving succour to government
leaders outside the EU who beat, starve, imprison
or murder their populations into submission.
One can argue that nearly all countries' governments
trangress some human rights in some way eg USA
Guantanamo Bay incarcaration camp but leaders whose
transgressions cover the whole population are in
an altogether different league and should be
shunned.
The EC by officially welcoming Robert Mugabe,
the Zimbabwean leader to their meeting is acting
hypocritically and the
EC concept though great as an ideal,
now loses my support in practice as a consequence.
No comments:
Post a Comment