26 July 2002

Fight the future for human rights

Marc Glendening tells the liberal Left that it must choose between defending civil liberties and its support for the European Union.

How do you think Tony Blair, Peter Hain, Denis McShane and other leading New Labour figures would have responded had the last Tory government announced they were planning to introduce the following measures?

It is a fair bet that New Labour would have denounced these proposals as outrageously authoritarian and would have rightly claimed that they were violations of the European Convention on Human Rights.

However, the measures cited above are not, of course, hypothetical. They are supported with enthusiasm by the current administration, and all either emanate from decisions taken by the European Union or stem from treaty obligations that we have entered into. The last example would be relevant to the United Kingdom were we to enter the single currency. Article 108 of the new Nice treaty forbids elected governments and MEPs from lobbying members of the European Central Bank.

What is becoming ever more apparent is that the rhetorical enthusiasm most on the Blairite Left express for the human rights agenda cannot be squared with that faction's enthusiasm for ever greater European political union. The EU represents a major threat to basic civil liberties and democracy. However, as is the case whenever inconvenient contradictions within the Third Way agenda are identified, Blairites tend to go one of two ways. Either they go all passive-aggressive and simply refuse to address the issue being raised, or, alternatively, they go on the attack, and question the sanity of those pointing out inconvenient truths.

Two years ago I attended a public meeting Keith Vaz was addressing in his then capacity of Europe Minister. He was asked to comment on press reports that the EU, the Home Office and the FBI were jointly working on how to increase state surveillance. His typically mischievous and humorous response was to say that the questioner had "obviously been watching too many episodes of the X-Files" and was in no doubt the sort of conspiracy theorist who sent anonymous letters in green ink to prominent people.

If Vaz ever emerges from his own personal twilight zone, it would be interesting to know how he explains away the fact that the European Parliament voted on May 30th - with the full support of all but one Labour MEP, Arlene McCarthy - to overturn existing data protection law. The new legislation will enable national law enforcement agencies to compel internet service providers and telephone companies to hand over logs relating to their customers' communications. Without this intervention, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, the instrument through which British authorities can carry out their snooping, could have resulted in Tony Blair's government being taken to the European Court of Justice. No doubt, however, it will now find itself challenged under Article 8, the right to privacy, of the (non-EU) European Convention on Human Rights.

Tony Bunyan of Statewatch, the human rights group that monitors Brussels, said in the run-up to the vote that it would constitute a "defining moment for the future of democracy in the EU. If all telecommunications are placed under surveillance, not only will data protection be fatally undermined but so too will be the very freedoms that distinguish democracies from authoritarian regimes".

John Wadham, director of Liberty, has also attacked the change in EU policy. And as revealed by The Observer on June 9th, the EU's own embryonic FBI, Europol, brought together state bodies from the member states last April. Plans for a common and more potent EU surveillance strategy were drawn up and included in a strategy paper, Expert Meeting on Cyber Crime: Data Retention. Europol's intervention in this matter disproves the claim it is only intended to be a "clearing house" for useful information. In fact, EU police officers will soon become operational in the member states and, for reasons that have never been justified, they enjoy immunity from prosecution.

Another aspect of Europol's work that should concern human rights activists is that, as confirmed by Charles Clarke, when a Home Office minister, in a response to Tory MP Jacqui Lait in July 2000, Europol can hold information concerning a person's "sexual orientation, religion, or politics". It doesn't take too much imagination to envisage how such information could be used for illegitimate ends. There have been allegations by whistle-blowers within Europol that officers have sold supposedly confidential information on EU citizens to criminal elements.

Europol, together with national law enforcement agencies, was charged by the Council Of Ministers in August of last year with drawing up a list of "troublemakers". The individuals on this list were to be "tracked and identified" and prevented from leaving their home countries and travelling to where EU summits were taking place. This database, which comes under the auspices of the Schengen Information System, is initially targeting environmentalists. This issue is closely related to the new common definition of terrorism drawn up in Brussels that defines the concept in the following way: "intentional acts destabilising the fundamental political, constitutional, economic or social structures".

In 1997, the Commission published Corpus Juris which was designed to initiate the idea of a "unified legal space". This document envisaged a harmonised criminal justice system in which trial by jury, habeas corpus, and double jeopardy would be removed. The introduction of the EU arrest warrant, that will enable fast track extradition within the Union, without the provision of prima facie evidence against the accused, is a first step towards this destination.

The issue of civil liberties is a dimension to the European debate that is destined to become more prominent. While many will, quite fairly, point to the increasingly appalling record of successive British governments on this issue, the fact is that within a still essentially liberal, representative democracy bad legislation can be reversed.

As history has shown, once the EU gets its hands on a competence and then legislates, it is virtually impossible to reverse the trend. The hard reality is that the liberal Left is now going to have to choose between its commitment to human rights and its hitherto axiomatic support for a more powerful EU.

by Marc Glendening - Campaign Director, Democracy Movement

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