Tag Archives: Country: European Union

Telegraph: UK-led plans to reform the European Court of Human Rights could have a “devastating” effect on thousands of people seeking justice in Russia, the Government has been warned.

BBC: The government is “quietly confident” it will secure changes to the European Court of Human Rights at a conference this week, Downing Street has said.

Zenit: Hungary’s Ambassador to the Holy See is rather perplexed by the negative reaction of some European figures and institutions to his country’s new Constitution — a document he sees as offering a possible impetus to a “Christian renaissance” in Europe.

Stefana Gennerini at C-Fam: The European Commission is using development funds to pay for abortions in countries that restrict the procedure and funding the two largest abortion providers in the world, International Planned Parenthood Federation and Marie Stopes International, according to a new report by European Dignity Watch. The report The Funding of Abortion through EU Development Aid reveals . . .

Boston Globe: Europe’s human rights court ruled Thursday that Britain can send a radical Muslim cleric and four other suspects to the United States to face terrorism charges in a case that has been closely watched as an indicator of whether tough U.S. prisons could influence extradition policy.

Irish Times: With the rate of payment of the charge at about 50 per cent local authorities are facing an unprecedented gap in funding.

BBC: Thousands at Dublin household charge protest

Turtle Bay and Beyond: The non-profit advocacy group European Dignity Watch has published a report that exposes and denounces EU funding of International Planned Parenthood Federation and Marie Stopes International, the two largest abortion providers in the world.

AP reports.

AP: Bailed-out Ireland will stage a referendum on the European fiscal treaty May 31 . . .

AP: Joachim Gauck, a former Lutheran pastor and East German pro-democracy activist with no party affiliation, was formally sworn in

IntoleranceAgainstChristians.edu: The Observatory’s Report on Intolerance and Discrimination against Christians in the Year 2011 was released on March 19th, 2012. This report portrays the most important developments with regard to freedom of religion, the most striking cases of intolerance and discrimination throughout Europe – and what individuals and institutions say about it. The report includes several statistics as well as analysis of the meaning of freedom of religion in the European context.

LifeSiteNews: Like most Irish people, I welcomed the Irish government’s rejection of calls made at a major UN hearing for Ireland to legalize abortion.

AP: The head of the Council of Europe on Wednesday criticized a new law in Hungary that sharply reduced the number of officially recognized churches and changed the procedure they need to follow to gain that status.

Religion Clause Blog: The Venice Commission is the Council of Europe’s advisory body on constitutional law. Yesterday, responding to a request from the government of Hungary for an advisory opinion, the Commission issued a 15-page report on Hungary’s 2011 Act On the Right to Freedom of Conscience and Religion and the Legal Status of Churches, Denominations and Religious Communities.

Grégor Puppinck, Director of the ECLJ at Turtle Bay and Beyond: In today’s Chamber judgment in the case of GAS et DUBOIS c. France (Requête no 25951/07), the European Court of Human Rights held, by six votes to one, that there had been no violation of the European Convention on Human Rights by the limitation of MPA techniques to heterosexual couples and by the French refusal to allow a woman to adopt her same-sex partner’s child.

Wall Street Journal (via Google): Hungary’s premier fired a new broadside in the country’s running battle of wills with the European Union, saying that Hungarians should be free to make their own laws without interference from Brussels.

Religion Clause Blog: A Turkish military court last week handed down an important decision on the rights of conscientious objectors.

Turtle Bay and Beyond: It was of course never to be expected that the European Commission, as a reply to critical questions from the European Parliament with regard to the generous funding it is handing out to ILGA-Europe (a homosexual lobby group with links to pedohile networks), would openly acknowledge to have committed a misuse of budgetary funds. But if replies to parliamentary questions are evasive and not to the point, this can be viewed as a clear indication that the Commission finds it very difficult to explain to the public what it is doing.

HispanicBusiness.com: European Union leaders on Friday threatened those responsible for a bloody crackdown in Syria with their day in court, as British Prime Minister David Cameron spoke of “medieval barbarity” unfolding in the Middle Eastern country.

AP: The European Union is moving closer to introducing mandatory quotas for the number of women on company boards after businesses failed to make sufficient progress in gender equality over the past year.

Wall Street Journal: The European Commission proposed Wednesday to suspend €495 million ($602.2 million) in European Union budget funds for Hungary in 2013 unless it acts quickly to cut its deficit.

LifeSiteNews.com: The Council of Europe has revealed that sex-selective abortion is widely practiced in Albania and the result is a growing gulf between the numbers of boys and the number of girls.

Turtle Bay and Beyond – International Law, Policy, and Institutions: In a recent series of posts, we have shed some light on the strange fact that the European Commission is maintaining, at the expense of taxpayers, a fake “non-governmental organization” called ILGA-Europe, which, pretending to be a voice of civil society, seeks to promote the opinion that homosexual behaviour should be rewarded through legal privilege.

Turtle Bay and Beyond: In Sweden, critics of homosexuality risk being sent to jail. And the European Court of Human Rights, demonstrating once again its complete and utter failure to protect the fundamental rights enshrined in the European Rights Convention, finds that this constitutes no violation of the freedom of opinion.

The Volokh Conspiracy: The case is Vejdeland v. Sweden (Feb. 9, 2012) . . . In December 2004 the applicants [who are adults] … went to an upper secondary school (gymnasieskola) and distributed approximately a hundred leaflets by leaving them in or on the pupils’ lockers. The episode ended when the school’s principal intervened and made them leave the premises . . .

Breitbart: Soros warned against addressing the crisis with spending cuts, urging the injection of funds instead.

ChicagoTribune.com: “This is a treaty outside of the EU,” British leader David Cameron insisted Tuesday at the House of Commons. “We are not signing it. We are not ratifying it. We are not part of it.” The decision by Cameron and Czech Prime Minister Petr Necas to reject the deal leaves Europe with a clumsy compromise and has thrown up legal questions about using EU-wide institutions like the European Court of Justice to enforce the pact.

BBC News: wenty-five of the EU’s 27 member states have agreed to join a fiscal treaty to enforce budget discipline.

The Guaridan The Observer: Viola Caon left her Italian home to find work. Now she returns to see how her former classmates are faring… and in the week that shocking figures showed how badly Europe’s youth is being hit by the unemployment crisis, we also talk to hard-hit twentysomethings in Athens and Madrid . . .

C-Fam Friday Fax: Hungarian leaders have passed a law protecting the traditional family, defying ongoing criticism that their new constitution would curtail abortion and homosexuality.

LifeNews.com: The ECLJ welcomes the adoption, by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), of a Resolution setting the principle that “Euthanasia, in the sense of the intentional killing by act or omission of a dependent human being for his or her alleged benefit, must always be prohibited.” This is the first time, in the past decades, that euthanasia is so clearly rejected by a European political institution.

The online database is here: Intolerance and Discrimination Against Christians in Europe.

Turtle Bay and Beyond – International Law, Policy, and Institutions: For years and years, the European Commission has been funding the activities of ILGA-Europe, a homosexualist lobby that, under the pretext of “fighting discrimination”, actually promotes a radical agenda and notoriously maintains close links to groups promoting pedophilia. Although this wasn’t exactly kept as a state secret, it somehow has escaped the attention of the wider public.

The Guardian: Prime minister tells Council of Europe that controversial rulings undermine public confidence in rights court

Yahoo! News: Hungary’s prime minister yielded on Wednesday in a dispute with the European Union that threatens aid for his country, saying he was willing to change contested laws tightening government control over institutions including the central bank.

Radio Prague (includes audio): A woman’s right to give birth at home is back in the spotlight in the Czech Republic, as a group of pregnant women intend to file a complaint at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. The Czech state makes planned home births virtually impossible; there are midwives qualified to deliver babies at home, but they lack official registration and insurance companies won’t cover them.

News from The Associated Press: The EU’s executive Commission said the new constitution that came into force Jan. 1 undermines the independence of the national central bank and the judiciary and does not respect data privacy principles.

Mark Steyn at National Review: Whether or not that’s what Rick Santorum said, it’s certainly the case that “demographic winter” makes Europe’s troubles all but impossible to solve. As you have observed, demographic decline doesn’t have to be an existential threat. The population of my town in New Hampshire peaked in the 1820 census and then dropped steadily until 1940, and we survived it because (unlike the latter-day US and EU) we hadn’t erected a system of government that depended on looting the future to bribe the present.

CNBC: Standard & Poor’s will cut the credit ratings of Italy, Spain and Portugal by two notches and downgrade France and Austria by one notch, a French newspaper said Friday, without citing its sources.

LifeSiteNews.com: European Union officials are making their disapproval of Hungary’s recent constitutional changes felt by threatening to withhold financial support if it does not remove its new amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman, according to one Hungarian source.

The Christian Institute: Figures in the report show 22.1 per cent of all abortions in the UK in 2008 were carried out on under 20-year-olds – nearly twice the EU average of 12.0 per cent.

C-Fam Friday Fax: European human rights lawyer J.C. von Krempach has taken a close look at the funding stream of the International Gay and Lesbian Association – Europe (ILGA) and concluded that most of their money comes from governments. Writing in the foreign policy blog Turtle Bay and Beyond, von Krempach found a vast majority of ILGA’s funds come from just two governmental entities, the European Commission and the Dutch government.

NCPA Policy Digest: Considering that the United States has a 17.75 percent share in the IMF, these lending commitments put the U.S. taxpayer at risk for an almost $20 billion loss should those countries be unable to repay the IMF.

News from The Associated Press: Police arrested 112 people in 22 countries after a yearlong investigation into child pornography, Europol said Friday, warning that technology is making combating the spread of child abuse images ever more difficult.

News from The Associated Press: European Union officials say that a first draft of a new treaty setting up tighter budget rules for eurozone countries has been sent to governments Friday.

News from The Associated Press: Poland’s prime minister defended his government’s support for greater integration in the European Union during a lively parliamentary debate Thursday on the country’s relationship with the crisis-ridden bloc.

NYTimes.com: senior European official said on Tuesday that Britain’s demands for measures to protect its financial services industry at last week’s summit meeting were impossible to meet and directly responsible for the collapse of e a Europe-wide agreement meant to help save the euro.

Reuters: It was billed as a summit to save the euro. It may be remembered as the day Europe lost patience with Britain, as most of the continent threw its lot in with EU founding members France and Germany and committed to binding their economies ever more tightly.

Yahoo! News: The European Union will outline a strategy on Monday to support activists living under repressive governments who are using technology to organise, mobilise and exercise their rights, European Commissioner Neelie Kroes said on Friday.

FT.com: Standard & Poor’s has warned Germany and the five other triple A members of the eurozone that they risk having their top-notch ratings downgraded as a result of deepening economic and political turmoil in the single currency bloc.

Turtle Bay and Beyond: ortunately, hardly any citizen ever reads the pompous yet irremediably silly resolutions through which the European Parliament lets the world know about its opinion on all matters that fall outside its competence.

Whatever the future holds, we need to understand that the economic collapse is not the main crisis which engulfs Europe. More significantly, we see the EU developing into the ever-tighter totalitarianism which was envisaged from its inception.

News from The Associated Press: Here are some questions and answers about the crisis . . .

CNN: he Federal Reserve, acting with five other central banks, took further steps Wednesday to make it cheaper for banks around the world to trade in U.S. dollars.

EUobserver.com: China is looking to buy EU factories and railways instead of wobbly government bonds as prices fall amid the eurozone crisis. Minister of commerce Chen Deming articulated the strategy at a business congress in China on Monday (28 November).

The Associated Press: European lawmakers narrowly rejected Ireland’s nominee to the European Court of Auditors on Wednesday after deeming him responsible for a €3.6 billion ($5 billion) error in calculating the Irish national debt.

European Commission: New approach to migration would establish agreements with EU neighbours and other countries to benefit the people and the countries concerned.

Eurasia Review: More than 250,000 residents out of a total population of one million in Brussels have Muslim roots, according to a study carried out by the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium and published in the Belgian media Friday.

TimesofMalta.com: Existing European asylum procedures do not adequately provide for gender and sexual orientation-based persecution, European gender awareness experts have warned.

Yahoo! News: German and French officials have discussed plans for a radical overhaul of the European Union that would involve establishing a more integrated and potentially smaller euro zone, EU sources say.

WSJ.com: In Italy, as in Greece, Spain and Portugal and eventually France, the welfare-entitlement state has hit a wall. Successive governments on the Continent, right and left, have financed generous entitlements with high taxes and towering piles of debt.

CNBC: While Greece’s teetering government continued to debate whether to stay in the euro on Thursday, European leaders talked for the first time of a possible Greek exit to preserve the single currency.

News from The Associated Press: Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou was flying to the chic French Riviera resort of Cannes on Wednesday to explain himself to European leaders furious over his surprise referendum on a bailout deal that took them months to work out.

Europa: Child abusers and viewers of child sex images on the web will face tough penalties in the EU, under new rules approved by Parliament on Thursday. The directive will also require EU countries to remove child porn web sites, or, should this prove impossible, allow them to block access to those pages within their territory. Studies suggest that between 10% and 20% of minors in Europe may be sexually assaulted during childhood.

Telegraph: Global stock markets dropped sharply as investors sold off shares after Greece’s shock decision to hold a referendum on its eurozone bail-out package thratened to intensify the region’s debt crisis.

News from The Associated Press: This year’s Conference of European Rabbis will focus on a range of issues affecting European and global Jewry, including attempts in Europe to ban the Jewish method of religious slaughter of animals.

Reuters: Germans expressed fury and frustration at Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou’s shock decision to call a referendum on the latest aid package, with some saying the gamble would push Greece out of the euro zone.

News from The Associated Press: Greeks have launched a wave of civil disobedience against the embattled government’s austerity measures designed to appease international creditors, which provided rescue loans to the country.

Guardian.co.uk: Under government plans, countries would not only implement human rights law but interpret it – and decide if they complied

The Guardian: Workers angry with Silvio Berlusconi’s pledges to make it easier for companies to sack employees, but hold back from strike call

BBC News – : Ministers have said attempts to reform the European Court of Human Rights will “take time” as the UK must persuade 46 other nations of the need for change.

The Guardian: Rulings from Strasbourg human rights court ‘sometimes too narrow’ and interpretations are disputed

CSMonitor.com: The Dow jumped 162 points to end at 11869 following reports that China will aid Europe by investing in a financial rescue fund.

Daily Mail Online: European human rights judges should meddle less often in cases which have already been through Britain’s courts, Ken Clarke said last night.

LifeNews.com: In a previously recorded interview that aired on October 22, 2011, Joseph Meaney, director of international coordination at Human Life International (HLI), spoke to EWTN’s Celtic Connections radio program about recent updates on the pro-life front in Eastern Europe.