eurealist.co.uk

Reacting to the News that the European Union has this week opened its Fundamental Rights Agency in Vienna with the stated purpose of collecting data on violations of the EU`s Charter of Fundamental Rights, provide advice to the EU and its member states and to raise public awareness.

The Times points out that many believe the agency should not have been opened because one of its core aims is to enforce the Charter of Fundamental Rights, which was explicitly adopted as legally non-binding but was then written into the EU constitution and that was voted down in France and the Netherlands so has not been ratified and can therefore have no legal standing.

But legal niceties aside, the agency now exists and will as intended take its place in enforcing the EU political aims.

The Charter itself was until the advent of the Constitution the most, explicit statement of the EU’s claim to direct legitimacy that has ever been produced. The idea being that the institutions and rights provided by the EU should in themselves provide the necessary basis for legitimate government.

There are several problems with the concept of International Human Rights, they are a direct attack on the sovereignty of the nation state, conflict with the ideals of democracy, they create tensions between different versions of human rights, create conflicts with religious doctrines, they are arbitrary applied to different states, many of the ideals are a sham and they are open to manipulation and interest-politics, and offer a disguise for power politics. The EU`s Charter of Fundamental Rights is a coup d’état, for the federalists, and by the left leaning Social Democrats who dominate the EU. They are using this document to permanently enshrine into law left-wing provisions such as the ‘right to strike’ rights to health care, education, and social and housing assistance.

The argument for the Charter runs something like this: The EU has clearly progressed beyond its initial stage of a purely voluntary association. It is an entity with strong supranational elements equipped with executive power. This is evidenced in the supranational character of the legal structure, which is supported and enhanced in particular by the European Court of Justice. In its rulings, it has long asserted the principles of supremacy and direct effect. National law gives way to Community law, and there is a need for safeguarding the rights of the citizens. Through its institutions, it forms a supranational regime with extended competencies for the ordinary man and woman in the EU

In the general scheme of the EU we have been forced to become citizen the Charter now gives us rights over and above our nation states, further diminishing our sovereignty and our choices. So the Charter process represents a very important development in the constitutionalisation of the EU.

The Charter was politically decided by those who stipulate that there must be international law to control excesses of previously sovereign national administrations, yet at the same time claims sovereignty for itself, so the Charta is an expression of EU power politics, and a maneuver to further advance the European Project. Of course quite how an external international agreement can be forced on a parliament which retains its own sovereignty is not debated, but it can only mean that the constitutional sovereignty can no longer reside in the nation states Parliament, which rather undermines Britain’s owns Parliaments assertion that it remains sovereign in all things.

As the EU seeks to turn itself into a single State, it is using common human rights standards, enforced by a central legislature and a Supreme Court, as a powerful weapon in imposing uniformity across the whole of the EU and subordinating national and local Courts and Constitutions to central rule, the Charter marks the EU as a polity with an extended sphere of competencies Giving the EU the powers to decide our rights would bring the EU Court of Justice into virtually every area of life and society.

For Britian in particular it is a very important development because the Charta curbs the power of judge made law, or English Common Law.

The growth of international law limits the principle of National Sovereignty because it forces recognition of equality of rights to non-nationals to those who have no duty to the nation state. Thus a Nation state will find it increasingly difficult to protect itself from those from outside the state who would work to destroy the nation state. This is all very fine for the EU which wishes to create a state of the regions, but it does not answer why the leaders of the nation state would wish to collude with a scheme that is specifically designed to remove the power of its citizens. It enforces a particular secular creed on nation states which are based on religious belifes forcing them to re-write their constitutions and to create laws forcing obedience to secular doctrines. In short it removes the powers of the people to choose their own rights according to their own societies norms.

This of course is why it was only ever adopted as legally non-binding and according to the EU minister of the time Keith Vas to be no more legally significant than a copy of the Beano.