Category Archives: Government

Britain, European Court, Government, History, Human Rights, Politics, Society, United Nations

Celebrating 800 years of the Magna Carta: why would Britain contemplate leaving the ECHR?

MAGNA CARTA & ECHR

The 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta will be celebrated in Britain this year. This was the treaty signed between King John and a group of rebellious barons in 1215 that guaranteed British citizens a range of freedoms and civil rights. One of the 25 guarantors of the Magna Carta was the Earl of Winchester, Saer de Quincy, whose ancestors were from France. De Quincy fought King John when he failed to respect the Magna Carta and it all contained, and asked the French prince Louis to lay claim to the English throne. Whilst on a crusade, and far away from home, De Quincy died in 1219.

As a crusader today, De Quincy would probably have been labelled a foreign fighter by the intelligence services and would never have made it to the Kingdom of Jerusalem, having been stopped by border control as he attempted to leave the UK. His attempts to have King John of Runnymede replaced by a French king would have landed him in jail under anti-terrorism laws. And no doubt GCHQ, the intelligence services listening outpost in Cheltenham, would have kept him and his fellow barons under 24/7 surveillance as a threat to national security.

Today Magna Carta (and the accompanying legal presumption of habeas corpus) is celebrated as one of the most important documents in the history of civil rights. It is widely seen and accepted as being the precursor to later conventions that protect human rights and the rule of law, including the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the European Convention on Human Rights and, more recently, the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. Magna Carta, though, was never meant to protect all the people, whereas the UN and European documents gives equal protection to all citizens, regardless of their status in society.

Today, too, we don’t need charters to protect Barons against the abuse of power by Kings. But we do need laws that protect citizens against abuse of power by governments, and we need not only national laws, but European and international ones.

David Cameron symbolises Magna Carta as the ultimate expression and mantra of British values. While some Tories are now promulgating the argument that the UK should withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and return to those traditional values, against the backdrop of the Magna Carta anniversary celebrations their arguments are especially ironic. For example, they strongly accuse the ECHR of limiting the freedom of governments, but King John probably complained too about the Magna Carta unduly restricting his absolute freedom to rule as he wanted. But crucially those in power must be bound by law in order to protect citizens from arbitrary rule.

800 years on, the values and principles laid down in Magna Carta have been embraced by large parts of the world. They have become universal and their shared values are at the core of the European Union as a community of citizens. We should be glad that European courts in Luxembourg and Strasbourg protect us against governments exceeding and abusing their powers, undermining civil liberties and the rule of law.

Fundamental rights, the rule of law and democratic principles enshrined into nationhood are frequently violated in nearly all EU member states. In some cases, the violations are serious and systematic. The current Hungarian government is one of the most egregious offenders. In recent years, the media has been critically gagged, electoral law changed to secure an absolute majority for the governing party, political opponents weakened and the independence and impartiality of the judiciary undermined. But there are also many other examples across Europe: the ant-gay laws in Lithuania, the deportation of Roma people from France, the cruel and inhumane treatment of underage asylum seekers in the Netherlands, and the collective disregard shown for the law and civil liberties in many countries’ counter-terrorism policies.

If we become accepting of tolerating torture, secret prisons, rendition, abduction, and indefinite detention without fair trials and representation then we will lose our moral authority. Such blots tarnish Europe’s status as a shining beacon of freedom and human rights in the world. EU governments must be held accountable for such crimes, especially those that are committed in the name of defending democracy.

That is why we need legal instruments to uphold our common values, even if this means that sometimes national authorities are overruled. EU member states voluntarily signed up to these supranational laws and conventions for good reason, namely because it is the essence of democracy that those in power are bound by laws and that their powers are limited. Whilst that may sometimes be awkward, such checks and balances are the vital safeguards which protect us against abuse of power by the state.

As it happens, these principles are not politically left or right-wing, nor are they alien to modern British culture. Quite the opposite: safeguarding citizens’ rights and the rule of law have their roots firmly established in that ancient, famous document that will be celebrated this year. Magna Carta does not set Britain apart from the rest of Europe. It is the expression and very epitome of the common European values that we have all come to embrace.

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European Parliament, Government, History, Society, Turkey, United Nations

Genocide. An emotive word that must be used correctly…

GENOCIDE

Intro: Genocide is a highly emotive word and shouldn’t be confused with other mass killings

A century ago, in 1915, Ottoman officials seized upon and rounded up Armenian intellectuals in Istanbul, most of whom were later murdered. Events which followed are still bitterly contested. The official Turkish version says that some 500,000 Armenians died, which included those fighting alongside the invading Russians against Ottoman forces. Others were also slayed as a regrettable side-effect of deportations that were perhaps understandable in the context of the times. However, many scholars say that up to 1.5m Armenians died, and imply that their deaths were a result of a deliberate and orchestrated campaign to eliminate the Ottoman empire’s only sizeable Christian population. Pressingly, given this account of events, members of the Armenian diaspora want events recognised as genocide.

Genocide is a highly emotive word and shouldn’t be confused with other mass killings; use of terminology and language matters as to which word should be used.

In 1948 the United Nations adopted a convention aimed at preventing and punishing acts of genocide, which it defined as the ‘deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnical, racial, religious or national group’. Agreement on the text involved a number of compromises. For example, targeting victims because of their class was not classed as genocide: Stalin would hardly have signed it if it meant being held to account for his mass slaughter of ‘middle peasants’. In the past century, the world has witnessed many mass slaughters, including some which have been acknowledged as genocide and some that do not fit within the UN’s definition. The genocidal nature of the slaughter of Rwanda’s minority Tutsis by majority Hutus militias, for instance, is not in question. Pol Pot’s reign of terror in Cambodia, however, does not strictly qualify, since the Khmers Rouges targeted no particular group.

Genocide as a word has considerable power. If mass slaughter is recognised as genocide when it is happening, it will be much harder for outside forces to sit idly by. When capitulation is over, an official declaration that it was genocide can give any survivors some grim satisfaction. But when that recognition is withheld, because of a technicality or due to political expediency, it will feel like the final insult. And the ‘crime of crimes’ tag that genocide has been given has led to some human rights activists and legal scholars expressing concern that this status sometimes overshadows the horror of other crimes against humanity.

Pope Francis and the European Parliament have very publicly described the Armenian massacres as genocide: the pontiff at a mass on April 12th attended by Armenia’s president, and the European Parliament in a plebiscite three days later commending the pope’s words and calling on Turkey, too, to recognise the killings as genocide. The Turkish government reacted with outrage and fury, with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan saying: ‘It is not possible for Turkey to accept such a crime, such a sin.’ Mr Erdogan’s foreign minister claimed Pope Francis had fallen for propaganda disseminated by the Armenians who ostensibly control the press in his homeland of Argentina. The irony, though, is that Mr Erdogan has done more than any previous Turkish leader to acknowledge the suffering and pain of Armenians under the Ottoman empire, such as when he offered his condolences last year on April 24th. But unquestionably, there are limits to the willingness of the Turkish government in facing up to, and naming, the crimes of his country’s past.

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China, Economic, Government, Politics

Economic (and political) reforms in China…

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ECONOMIC DATA from China reveals that growth has slowed sharply and that deflation has set in. As China’s economy is being weighed down by both a property slump and weak factory production, many may conclude that the received wisdom over China belongs to the pessimists. Certainly, manufacturing output is at its weakest since the dark days of the global financial crisis. In the first three months of 2015, GDP grew at ‘only’ 7% year-on-year. Growth predictions suggest that this year will probably be China’s weakest in 25 years.

After three soaring decades, fears are rising that China is on the verge of an economic crash. That would be a disaster. China is the world’s second-largest economy and Asia’s pre-eminent rising power. Fortunately, however, the pessimists are missing something from their presumptive models which are not truly reflective of China today. China is not only more economically robust than they allow, it is also putting itself through a quiet (and welcome) financial revolution.

The robustness rests on several pillars. The vast bulk of China’s debts are domestic, and the government still has enough leverage to stop debtors and creditors getting into a panic.

The country has been steadily shifting the balance away from investment and towards consumption, which will help to put the economy on a more stable footing. With a boom in services, China generated over 13m new urban jobs last year, a record that makes slower growth acceptable. Given China’s huge economy, expected growth of 7% this year would boost the global economy by more than 14% (compared to 2007).

But the real reason to doubt the pessimists is China’s reforms. After more than a decade of dithering, the government is acting in three vital areas. First, in finance, it has started to loosen control over interest rates and the flow of capital across China’s borders. The cost of credit has been historically and artificially low, minimising the returns available to savers, as well as succouring inefficient state-owned firms and pushing up investment. Caps on deposit rates are becoming less relevant, thanks now to an explosion of bank-account substitutes that have attracted almost a third of household savings. The governor of China’s central bank, Zhou Xiaochuan, has said there is a ‘high probability’ of full-rate liberalisation by the end of this year.

China is also becoming more tolerant of cross-border cash flows. Slowly but surely, the yuan is becoming more flexible; international conglomerates and multinational firms are able to move revenues abroad far more easily than before. The government’s determined stance to get the IMF to recognise the yuan as a convertible currency before the end of 2015 should pave the way for bolder reforms.

The second area is fiscal. In the early 1990s, reforms gave local government bodies greater responsibility for spending, but few and limited sources of access to revenue. China’s problem of too much investment since then largely stems from those policies. Stuck with a flimsy tax base, cities have relied on sales of land to fund their operations and have engaged in reckless off-balance-sheet borrowing.

The finance ministry insists it has a plan in place to sort out this mess by 2020. Part of those plans include central government transferring funds to the provinces for social priorities, while local government agencies are being promised more in tax revenues. A pilot programme has already been launched in an attempt to clear up local-government debt. This will lay the ground for a municipal-bond market – which, despite the risks, will likely be much better than today’s opaque funding for provinces and cities.

The third area of reform is administrative. At the start of his premiership in 2013, Prime Minister Li Keqiang pledged that he would cut red tape and bureaucracy by making life easier for private companies. Since then, there has been a boom in the registration of private firms: 3.6m were created last year, almost double the number registered in the previous year.

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IN TIME, the cumulative effects of these reforms will lead to capital being allocated more efficiently. Lenders will price risks more accurately, with the most deserving firms being given funding options and savers earning decent returns. This will have the effect of slowing China’s economy down – how could it not? – but gradually and without breaking the system.

Dangers will remain. Liberalisation breeds instability. When countries ranging from Thailand to South Korea dismantled capital controls in the 1990s, their asset prices and external debts surged, which ultimately led to the then banking crises of south east Asia. China has strong defences but nonetheless its foreign borrowing is rising and its stockmarket is up by three-quarters in just six months.

How politics changes in China is also important. Whilst the economic reforms the country proposes have high-level backing, the anti-corruption campaign of President Xi Jinping means that Chinese officials live in a state of constant fear of state investigators. Many officials dare not engage in local experiments for fear of offending someone powerful.

Political reforms matter, too, because there is a pressing need to end the dire system of hukou, or household registration, which relegates some 300m people who have migrated to cities from the countryside to second-class status and hinders their ability to become empowered consumers. Similarly, farmers and ex-farmers need the right to sell their houses and land, or they will not be able to share in China’s transformation.

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