Manifesto on EU, Budapest 2003

national | miscellaneous | news report Saturday March 29, 2003 00:15 by Hungarian Angel - Hungarian Angel -Civil Control Power- magyarangyal at mailbox dot hu

EU colonialization

On 23rd of March 2003, there was held an EU-critical international meeting in Budapest, titled "EU-enlargement 2004, the unfair methods of colonialization". There was internationally constructed and signed a "Manifesto on EU" http://groups.yahoo.com/group/magyarangyal/files/DECLARATION_EN.html

MANIFESTO ON EUROPEAN UNIONadopted by participants in the International Alternative Conference on "EU-enlargement 2004: unfair methods of colonialization," held in Budapest, 23 March 2003:-Aware of the fatal effect of current enlargement of the European Union for the candidate countries and the need to strengthen democracy, the rule of law and respect for human rights in Europe, and recognizing the presence of different kind of dishonest methods in all candidate countries in order to push these countries into the European Union, we as participants from 10 European countries in the International Alternative Conference on "EU-enlargement 2004: unfair methods of colonization" have adopted the following Declaration:1. THE EMERGING NEW EU: A THREAT TO FREEDOM 2. THE UNFAIR EU REFERENDUMS 3. THE ECONOMIC DANGERS OF EU MEMBERSHIP 4. EU MEMBERSHIP AS DIVIDING HUNGARIANS FROM ONE ANOTHER 1. THE EMERGING NEW EU: A THREAT TO FREEDOM After the collapse of communism the Central and East European countries have won back their freedom, which is the most valuable treasure for them. Now most of them are among the EU candidate countries. The constitutions of all EU candidate countries clearly declare that they are independent and sovereign democratic republics. Considering the current regulation of the European Union, decisions of the European Court and drafts of the new European Constitution being debated in the European Convention, it seems impossible to preserve state independence and sovereignty and political freedom within the EU. One recalls the statement made by the EU Court of Justice: "Member states have irrevocably surrendered their sovereign rights to their own created union. They cannot reverse this process by later measures, incompatible with the spirit of the union. And the right of the union, established by proxy, is superior to any dissenting domestic legal instrument including the state constitution." A framework of a new Soviet-like superpower is now clearly outlined. David Heathcoat-Amory, a British Tory MP on the Convention, says that what is happening is profoundly alarming. The whole Convention is going off the rails. According to the latest proposals in the planned Constitution, the European Union will be endowed with a single legal personality and a unitary institutional structure. It will be organised "on a federal basis", and everyone will have dual citizenship. The European State will have arrived. Moreover, each of the existing EU institutions will get more powers, which they can only do at the expense of national parliaments, governments and peoples. This will do nothing to close the glaring "democratic deficit" in which people feel alienated from the EU decision-making process. A new "world order" in Europe seems to be constituted by several recent measures: Last year the European Parliament voted Yes for a proposal that will give law enforcement agencies the right to monitor telephone, internet and e-mail traffic throughout the EU. Under this new EU directive, the police and other state agencies will be able to oblige internet service providers and phone companies to keep data on whomever citizens in EU member countries are communicating with, and what they are downloading from the internet. Tony Bunyan of Statewatch, the human rights group that monitors the EU, commented on this issue: "The vote in the European Parliament and the final decision on this issue will be a defining moment for the future of democracy in the EU. If all telecommunications - phone calls, e-mails, faxes, and internet usage - 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." The proposal for a CORPUS JURIS (a combination of an EU criminal code and criminal procedure) protecting the EU's financial interests is the embryo of a future European Criminal Code. According to this the European Public Prosecutor will be an authority of the European Community, responsible for investigation, prosecution, committal to trial, presenting the prosecution case at trial, and the execution of sentences concerning the offences defined. He is envisaged as independent with respect to both national authorities and European Community institutions. If implemented, the EU would become the sole prosecuting authority in cases of suspected budget fraud, with the right, through its agents, both to conduct investigations into its suspicions AND conduct trials within all member countries according to its OWN rules of law, as described in the Corpus Juris. We believe that the peoples of Europe must be offered a choice between an integrated European State administered from Brussels and an association of democratic States founded on the primacy of national parliaments and the wishes of their own peoples. Our choice is clearly the second alternative: remaining outside the barriers of the European Union, in a partnership with all European countries and the EU and EFTA. We support the proposal to transform the EU into a Europe of Democracies (ED), by means of a treaty of association of free and self-governing European states and an open economic area.2. THE UNFAIR EU REFERENDUMS Preconditions for fairly conducted Accession Referendums are absolutely not ensured in the EU candidate countries. Nor are they ensured in Hungary. For a fair and properly conducted referendum on EU accession, the following minimal criteria should be met: a./ the question should be fair; b./there should be enough time for a full debate; c./ maximum public participation should be encouraged; d./ state resources should be divided equally between supporters and opponents; e./ supporters and opponents should have equal access to the broadcast media; f./ the referendum should be monitored by an impartial body, or at least the opposing organizations should be represented on monitoring bodies; g./ non-national bodies, especially the EU institutions themselves, should not interfere in a national referendum campaign. Currently in Hungary and in all other candidate countries, all of these criteria are being breached. a./ The question being put in the referendum is misleading and unfair, because the question ("Do you agree that the Hungarian Republic become a member of the European Union ?) is not capable of being responded to as required in this case. A full and fair question would be: "Do you agree that the Hungarian Republic become a member of the European Union according to the agreed accession treaty, thus permitting EU law to override national law in any case of conflict and without providing for any right of withdrawal from EU membership?" b./ The Hungarian people are not adequately informed of the details of the Accession Treaty or about the contents of EU law which henceforth is to regulate their lives irrevocably. Up till now there is no official translation of the Accession Treaty, nor of the 20,000 or so EU laws and regulations that must be adopted in Hungary. Only an unofficial draft of the Accession Treaty can be found on the internet in recent days. No publication has been distributed about these matters in order to explain their legal background to ordinary electors. The electors are entitled to have a full disclosure of the legal and other implications of these documents in order to be able to decide their fate. As a consequence, there will not be enough time for a full debate or to give citizens sufficient knowledge to enable them make an established decision. The official Government campaign provides no detailed information. Its main task is to convince people by referring not to facts but to emotions, and to conceal the potential disadvantages of EU accession for Hungary. No one warns Hungarian voters that by joining the EU they are being committed to abolishing the forint in due course, for the Accession Treaty commits them to joining Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), and that consequently control of interest rates and the exchange rate will eventually move to the EU Central Bank in Germany, which is responsible for the euro. No one draw Hungarian voters' attention to the fact that in the EU Hungary will no longer have the power to sign trade treaties with other countries, and that in future this will be done by the EU Commission on behalf of the EU as a whole. Do Hungarian voters realise that within the EU Hungary cannot on its own change a single EU law, even though the Hungarian government, people and parliament may be totally against it? c./ The government is spending a budget of more than 2000 millions HUF (ca. 230 HUF = 1 Euro) on its EU campaign. All parties in the Hungarian Parliament are for a YES vote and make official propaganda for it. EU-critical groups and parties get no governmental aid for their activity. The mass media represents only the YES case, opposing opinions remain unreported. A typical example of that is how the media boycotted last week the press conference of the Hungarian Crown Land Protection Movement and the World Federation of Hungarians regarding the unconstitutionality of the Hungarian accession referendum. d./ The Hungarian referendum will not be monitored by any kind of impartial body. Opposition organizations will not be represented in monitoring bodies and there will be no manual recount of votes in order to ensure the validity of the official result. Control of the referendum will be exercised only by the Hungarian parliamentary parties, who are all for a YES. e./ State offices and non-national bodies, especially those of the EU institutions and representatives (Romano Prodi, Pat Cox, Guenther Verheugen, Jean-Luc Dehaene etc.) have been continually interfering in the Hungarian national referendum campaign and trying to convince people to vote for the EU. Summarized: it is clear that the Hungarian Government is ready to use any kind of unfair means to reach the pre-decided result they intend to achieve. The issues raised under paragraphs a./ to e./ are all: DISCRIMINATORY, UNCONSTITUTIONAL AND ARE CONTRARY TO THE DECLARED VALUES OF THE EUROPEAN UNION ITSELF. 3. THE ECONOMIC DANGERS OF EU MEMBERSHIP In the present condition of Hungarian agriculture and the nationally owned enterprises, accession to the EU could be like a suicide note signature. The average price of agricultural land in Hungary is only about 10 % of the EU average. The minimum wage in Hungary is recently 50.000 HUF (217 Euro), the minimum pension 21.800 HUF (95 Euro) per month. Almost 90 % of large corporations are owned and controlled by international companies (the energy sector, telecommunication, agricultural processing firms etc.). Although Hungarian agriculture is able to produce food for 30 million persons, because of the restrictive quotas prescribed by the EU Accession Treaty, Hungarian agriculture within the EU could effectively be decimated, especially its backbone, the family farms. 4. EU MEMBERSHIP AS DIVIDING HUNGARIANS FROM ONE ANOTHER After World War 1 (The Trianon Treaty) and World War 2 (The Paris Treaty) almost 4 Million ethnic Hungarians were cut off from their fatherland, and live in the neighbouring countries of Romania, Slovakia, Austria, Ukraine, Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia. For Hungary to join the EU without settling the problems caused by these unlawful and injustice treaties would create a new iron curtain between the Hungarians living in Ukraine, Serbia and other part of the Carpathian basin, and could undermine the Hungarian communities living there. For example in Kárpátalja, belonging recently to Ukraine, or in Voivodina belonging to Serbia, a Hungarian pensioner will have to pay the equivalent of 4-5 months pension to get a visa permitting a move across the border to Hungary, when the visa system envisaged by the EU's Schengen regime comes into place this year. This will decrease the chance of their survival as distinct communities, and their ability to maintain the traditional identity of the Hungarians of these countries. Budapest, March 23 2003.