Political Tyrants buried Europe's Magna Carta!
Now the Charter is set to be declared authorized and certified European law. The Belgian government demands action.
They tried to kill Europeans’ Freedom!
Major Victory of freedom is underway.
‘Rocambalesque!’ (Utterly Fantastic!)
That’s how one of Europe's top lawyers reacted to the news. France had failed in its mission to transmit Europe’s Democratic Charter, already signed and sealed, to other Member States! It had been locked in France’s archives at the Quai d’Orsay for seventy years! Meanwhile the Charter’s legal power to protect democratic freedoms was frozen.
Now Belgium is demanding action. It wants to see and possess a fully authorized copy of the Charter that its ministers signed in 1951!
Charter of Freedom
Imagine, after King John and the barons had signed the Britain’s Magna Carta in 1215, it was lost for ever. In fact it nearly was. Justice, the rule of law, freedom from arbitrary arrest, Jury trials would be gone!
Wikipedia sums it up:
Neither side stood behind their commitments, and the charter was annulled by Pope Innocent III, leading to the First Barons' War. After {King} John's death, the regency government of his young son, Henry III, reissued the document in 1216, stripped of some of its more radical content.
Then it was practically buried out of sight until the 16th century.
The Magna Carta was treasured in America by the Pilgrim Fathers. The Founding Fathers saw it as a declaration of individual freedoms, freedom of personal belief, and freedom from oppressive and tyrannical government falsely claiming divine rights. The king wanted to govern, exploit property, imprison and tax without the people's consent. The US Constitution is the living embodiment of many freedoms from tyrants and tyrannical government.
Humans have a free conscience. It is self-evident that human rights were given by the Creator God to individuals. No government can give fellow humans their rights. They don’t own them. Hence government must be of the people, by the people, for the people. Freedom is key.
Europe’s long struggle from freedom
Europe's case is, of course, more complicated. The USA began as a new State with a new Constitution. Europe’s ancient States have to struggle against the weight of centuries of negative history to assure today’s lasting freedoms.
Let me try to summarise:
1. Europe had wars between kingdoms and States from before Roman times up to 1950. Now Western Europe is living in the longest period of peace -- ever!
2. Robert Schuman, then French Foreign Minister, led the French government to propose to other governments a constitutionally innovative system for peace. Nothing like it had ever been attempted by Europe's ancient states.
Legally it created a new order of association, called a Community. It lay mid-way between a federal system like USA, Canada and a confederal system, an association of States, like NATO.
It is called a supranational system. Just one sector such as coal and steel is implicated. The management of the Single Market is governed by a High Authority (later called the European Commission). It alone has federal powers over all Member States. It is subject to threefold democratic control by assemblies of individuals in a parliament, associations active in the economy, and government ministers in a council. It is also subject to a Court of Justice. The States can conduct their other business as usual as independent countries. That contrasts it with a Federation or Super-State.
3. This supranational method succeeded in its aim: 'to make war not only unthinkable but materially impossible.' States could not go to war if their energy and steel was subject to the democratic control of the people. Such an innovation had never been introduced before in human history.
4. Who could join? Before proposing the European Community of Coal and Steel, Schuman's government had initiated the Council of Europe. Its purpose? To consolidate European and eternal human values and provide a Court of appeal for citizens oppressed by their governments. Entrance to the Council of Europe was restricted to States who could satisfy strict conditions of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. It was evident that the Soviet Communists and Fascists like Nazis or theocracies would never agree to these conditions of freedom of speech, assembly, religion etc.
Ten States signed the Council of Europe's Statutes in London’s ornate St James's Palace on 5 May 1949. Twelve States had signed by the time of its first session in August 1949. It created a flag with twelve stars.
5. The BIG Question then arose: the relationship of the corruption-stopping Council of Europe to the internal workings of the Community. How could Europeans use the Convention in conjunction with a technical treaty on a single market for Coal and Steel so that citizens would retain their freedoms? Would all future politicians respect and adhere to the Convention of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms in Community matters?
The Community was aimed to stop coal and steel Cartels from dominating scarce resources, politics and finance in a way that had previously led to the arms race and world wars. International cartel or monopoly control brings industrialists unrestricted profits. World wars too. Wars bring extra profits for unscrupulous steel and energy barons.
Could the Community leadership be seized by anti-democratic forces?
6. Since my time in the European News Bureau of a major US media group, I was puzzled about why Schuman, who was a great admirer of the American system of democracy, had not made the link to this specific and legal Convention. True, it was understood at first that candidate States had to be Members of the Council of Europe, but then over the years politicians tended to deny that their European dealings were subject to the Convention. They gave themselves a get-out-of-gaol free card. They felt they had a free hand to create new treaties modifying and changing the whole European system for their own advantage.
They said the Council of Europe had nothing to do with the Community. Corrupt practice increased in the closed-door meetings of politicians. New treaties sprouted up. Politicians created new institutions, pillars and powers. Unrestrained secretive bureaucracies abounded. They blew up a balloon of billions of debt and corrosive inflation. They dug deeper into the democratic deficit. They changed the name. They called it the European Union.
This was bizarre as all three of the early Community treaties were discussed in the Assembly of the Council of Europe. Each was examined for democratic adherence to the Convention of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms.
None of the subsequent ones were. They took a constitutional treaty that the people had rejected in referendums and made it valid for themselves. The present Lisbon Treaty is composed, word for word, of articles that were rejected in referendums in France and the Netherlands. Hardly democratic! Politicians just took these same articles and remixed them in a treaty with a different name.
It is a system by politicians, with politicians, for politicians. France, the Netherlands or UK were not able to vote in a referendum. Many protested including European Commissioner McCreevy.
7. After years going of through Schuman's archives and national archives of Member States, I found a trace of a mysterious document that Schuman called the Charter of the Community. I found extracts in some legal textbooks of the 1950s.
So in 2008, when I had the chance to speak to France's Minister of Europe, Bernard Cazeneuve (later prime minister), I asked him if I could have a copy of this Charter. He supplied me with a document, which I reproduced on my website schuman.info. It is entitled Declaration commune or Joint Declaration.
It makes clear that all aspects of European integration based on this supranational method must start with individual freedom and freedom of the economic actors and the nation States. Thus if it was a legal instrument it could be used to fight corruption and over-intrusive government.
8. But what was the legal status of this document with the seemingly innocuous title? Why had no one spoken of it over the decades since 1950s? One clue was the fact that the French Foreign Ministry was full of Gaullists after the war. Charles de Gaulle seized power again in 1958 and was president of the Republic until 1969. The Grand Charles, as a new Charlemagne, was vehemently opposed to the European Community and the very idea of a supranational authority that could rein in his autocratic power.
Several of my attempts over the years to get the European Commission to publish the Declaration under the Freedom of Information regulation, failed. That seemed to me to be suspicious.
One official complaint is still outstanding. In joint press conferences, I twice asked the Commission Vice President, the President of the Council of Ministers and and the representative of the European Parliament to publish it so it could be discussed for the grand two-year-long Conference on the Future of Europe. They agreed in public but did failed to publish the document as promised. Why?
9. Then, looking through the Belgian archives recently, I was advised by the archivist to write to the Ministry's Department of Treaties, which is not open to the public. They confirmed that they had never received the Declaration.
Very strange. They should have. One article of the Treaty says that all the original documents will be kept in Paris and all signatory States will receive an authorized, certified copy. This is printed in a special typeface and follows special layout rules. Each page has a red frame.
But apparently, either by neglect, ignorance or wilful mischief, the Paris Ministry of Foreign Affairs had never sent a copy of the Charter of the Community to the five other signatory States. Extraordinary omission. Without receipt of an official, certified copy its importance was likely to be forgotten. Doubts could be raised about the legal oversight of institutions that the document demands.
The Belgian ministry was therefore in a dilemma. Here was a document, perhaps the key document of European unity giving an overview of the whole peace-enhancing innovation. Its legal force was assured by its treaty format and its legal text, reinforced by signatures of Six European Governments. Two of Belgium’s ministers, van Zeeland and Meurice, had signed it. It was signed also by other ministers such as Schuman, Sforza, Adenauer, Bech, Stikker and van den Brink.
Yet the Belgian Government had no official trace of it in their archives. Nor apparently had any of the other signatory governments.
10. This week I was pleasantly surprised to receive a copy of a diplomatic letter from the Belgian Government to the French Government requesting a copy of the Joint Declaration, the Charter of the Community.
What is the significance of this? Well it confirms that the Charter is fully part of the European democratic process. How this will work out in practice against years of misrule is yet to be seen.
I hope the Charter will eventually arrive in ministries of signatory States soon --- 70 years late! Some Europeans have been born, raised children and grandchildren and passed on while a procession of politicians continued to block their citizens’ God-given rights.