St Ives Liberal Democrats

Graham's blog Friday 10 July 2009

Parliament resumes formally next week in Strasbourg, which means that frantic struggles are taking place behind the scenes this week to secure the jobs which bring the bigger offices and other fringe benefits of status. The race for president of parliament was enlivened by the withdrawal on Monday of one of the two internal candidates from within the European People's Party: Italian Mario Mauro's decision to pull out paved the way for Pole Jerzy Buzek to be named the EPP's candidate by acclamation. The Socialists decided not to field a candidate, they will support Buzek in return for EPP votes for their candidate in 30 months time at the halfway stage of Parliament's mandate. I pursued my bid to secure the job until Wednesday morning, when it became clear that to continue would risk dividing the Group I have spent so much time building. I fell on my sword and withdrew in favour of Buzek, allowing us to secure the three-party alliance on the management of the House that the EU needs at present, since the increased fragmentation of EU politics threatens our ability to agree on a way out from the concurrent economic, energy, environmental and constitutional crises in which we are presently mired. The Greens are putting up no candidate; nor are the Conservative and Reform Group or the anti-EU Group to which UKIP belongs, so the only challenger to Buzek is a Swedish candidate from the far-left United European Left Group. which meant that the televised candidates' debate yesterday was rather lacking in spice and that a 69 year old former Polish Prime Minister will be elected easily in the first round of voting next Tuesday.

The struggle for vice-presidencies, committee chairs and other posts continues in a 'mine is bigger than yours' atmosphere which leaves the voters cold. Many of us will be glad to get away for the summer in a fortnight's time.

The real business of the EU continues, however. The European Commission has announced the funding of nearly 10,000 new Erasmus Programme scholarships which will allow over 8,000 students from beyond the EU to study here in 2009-2010 and 1,500 EU students to spend a year studying outside the EU. 105 countries outwith the EU are involved. The Commission is also to try to enforce more effectively the right of EU citizens (and their families) to move and live freely in any other EU country. a number of court cases have shown that although the right exists in theory it is not always easy to enjoy in practice.

I was pleased to welcome to Parliament a group of students from Pilton Community College in Barnstaple. On Friday I will visit the Sir Bernard Lovell school, just outside Bristol, to discuss progress in my programme to bring Chinese language teachers into south west schools.

When I piloted through Parliament in 2001 the law establishing the European Arrest Warrant I did so on an undertaking from the Justice and Home Affairs Commissioner that it would be accompanied by a Framework Decision on Procedural Rights for Defendants in Criminal Legal Proceedings. It is not that defendants have no rights: every legal system in the EU guarantees rights for defendants. They are also guaranteed, in broad terms, by the European Convention on Human Rights and by the Charter of Fundamental Rights of EU citizens. But nowhere are they codified into one EU law. Commissioner Vitorino was true to his word and the Commission brought forward a draft framework decision: however it was never adopted by the member states' governments and has remained stuck in Council ever since. I was pleased therefore to see that the Commission has now withdrawn its proposal for a comprehensive framework decision and aims to replace it by a series of smaller proposals, the first of which - the right to interpretation and to translation in criminal legal proceedings - was published this week.

One piece of interesting news this week has been the unrest in Xinjiang province in western China. I visited its capital, Urumqi, three or four years ago and was struck then by the potential for serious trouble: it has now become so serious that president Hu Jintao had to leave the G8 meeting in Italy to return home to deal with it. As a student of Chinese and now a member of parliament's foreign affairs committee I hope to devote more time in the next five years to helping China secure a soft landing into democracy. Nothing is impossible if you think big enough and work hard enough.