A couple of weeks back I wrote a post revealing that the EU has been giving millions of euros to anti-death penalty groups in the United States. As The Wall Street Journal subsequently commented in an editorial on my Telegraph piece: European countries may need bailing out, but you’ll be pleased to know that the European Union has enough money to promote human rights and democracy—in America. Don’t laugh. American states are free to decide their own penal codes, which vary widely and change as facts and public values evolve. Europe won’t …
Why on earth are British taxpayers being forced to fund European Union lobbying for policy campaigns in the United States? Furthermore, why is the EU directly interfering in domestic political debates in America, and so far without Congressional oversight? As the research detailed below demonstrates, the EU’s European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights (EIDHR) is spending millions of Euros on US-based campaigns against the death penalty. An extraordinary development. The EIDHR project list for 2009 (the latest year for which a full itemised list is given), unearthed by my …
If further evidence is needed that the European Union is an emperor with no clothes when it comes to global power, look no further than its handling of the Libya issue. With several hundred Libyans already dead at the brutal hands of Colonel Gaddafi and his murderous thugs, all the EU has been able to muster is a mealy-mouthed statement condemning the violence, but without even identifying the key figure responsible. Here’s the full statement issued earlier this week by Baroness Ashton, the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Policy: The …
Harvard University’s Niall Ferguson recently criticized the Obama Administration for lacking foresight and planning over the events in Egypt. The point of his criticisms of the Administration—and, by extension, the European Union—was illustrated over a year ago in a Heritage Foundation “war game.” In late 2009, Heritage invited security experts and Washington-based policymakers to “game” a fictional scenario of its own whereby Tunisia was hit with a major earthquake. Significant political and civil unrest followed, accompanied by large numbers of refugees flowing from Tunisia to Italy and Malta. The exercise …
Pity the poor euro. It’s a currency, but it’s asked to be so much more. More, indeed, than any currency can possibly be. The euro was born to glorious pomp and circumstance just 12 years ago, replacing a gaggle of currencies (including the mighty German D-Mark) with a single currency and replacing a collection of central bankers with one powerful voice, the European Central Bank. The intended advantages of a single currency for all of Europe were obvious enough—no more internal exchange rates, no need to carry multiple currencies, no …
The Washington Post is right. In an editorial today, the paper called to account the European Parliament, whose fixations on “amorphous anxieties” about privacy (to use the Post’s words) are threatening American security. The Parliament, for reasons one suspects of local politics, is rushing headlong toward a confrontation with the United States over the sharing of air travel data (known as Passenger Name Records). The U.S. uses data like this to track and capture terrorists like Faisal Shazad, the Times Square bomber. It is too early to tell whether it …
Maybe international treaties do send perfectly good jobs overseas after all; it’s just that these treaties do so by regulating commerce at home rather than facilitating it abroad. The Kyoto Protocol is evidence of this fact. Less than a week ago, as the European Environment Agency was celebrating reducing carbon production by close to 17%, the Guardian reported that, based on consumption of carbon rather than production of it, European greenhouse emissions actually increased significantly over the past decade: The original 15 EU member states who signed Kyoto have dropped …
Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw (Radek) Sikorski was probably being polite when he described, in a conference call on Friday with U.S. policy experts, the U.S. government as “a friend of the Eastern Partnership” initiative, a Polish-Swedish venture within the EU, which covers Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, and the three countries of the Caucasus. The disparity between the U.S. and EU in terms of economic resources dedicated to Eastern Europe is overwhelming. While the EU spends billions on supporting this partnership, the United States spends a grand total of $311 million annually …
Speaking to younger members of her conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party about Germany’s 16 million foreign worker population, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said this past Saturday: We kidded ourselves a while, we said: ‘They won’t stay, sometime they will be gone’, but this isn’t reality. And of course, the approach [to build] a multicultural [society] and to live side-by-side and to enjoy each other… has failed, utterly failed. This analysis, while spot on, is unfortunately years late. Three years ago The Heritage Foundation’s Senior Policy Analyst for European Affairs …
Last week, European Parliament member Daniel Hannan promoted his new book, The New Road to Serfdom: A Letter of Warning to America, at the Cato Institute. In what he called “a message from the future,” Hannan gave ample warning of what will happen if we do not change our path toward Euro-socialism, but he also provides a note of hope for the American ideal. One never knows what to expect from a man who is known for being a viral video celebrity—unless that man is Daniel Hannan. Ruffling feathers in …
