Eurobloat #0056 • December 2014
December was the month the new Commission promised a "fresh start" of doing less, while the Court declared that the EU's own legal order sits above the European human rights system, and a magical fund turned twenty-one billion euros into three hundred and fifteen. The year of austerity ended, as ever, with Brussels conjuring money it did not have.
Folly of the Month: The Court rules that the EU answers to no higher court
On 18 December the Court of Justice issued Opinion 2/13 and blocked the EU from joining the European Convention on Human Rights, a step the treaties actually require it to take. The reasons were revealing: the draft deal would let an outside court, the one in Strasbourg, review the EU's acts and, worse, undermine the "autonomy" of the Luxembourg judges themselves. Stripped of the legalese, the EU's own court decided that nothing, not even the continent's foremost human rights tribunal, may sit in judgment over Brussels. A union that lectures member states about the rule of law had just ruled itself beyond the reach of the one court designed to protect citizens from the state.
1. Twenty-one billion euros becomes three hundred and fifteen
The European Council endorsed the Juncker plan on 18 December, a scheme that takes twenty-one billion euros of seed money, much of it raided from existing budgets, and promises to "mobilise" three hundred and fifteen billion through a leverage ratio of 1:15. Even the Commission's friendly think-tanks noted that historical multipliers run nearer 1:5, which is to say the headline figure was always more press release than economics.
2. A "fresh start" of doing less, by listing what it built
On 16 December the incoming Vice-President Frans Timmermans unveiled the 2015 work programme, earmarking around eighty pending proposals for the scrapheap in the name of "better regulation". One cheers the bonfire, of course. One simply notes that the same institution wrote all eighty in the first place, and that nobody in Brussels has ever lost a job over the waste.
3. Obesity may now be a "disability", says Luxembourg
On 18 December the Court ruled in the Kaltoft case that, while obesity is not in itself a disability, its effects may amount to one under EU equal-treatment law. So the judges in Luxembourg now help decide, for a Danish childminder and everyone else, where a waistline ends and a protected category begins, a question that used to belong to national courts and common sense.
4. The euro grows to nineteen members, ready or not
As the year closed, Lithuania completed its march into the single currency, adopting the euro on 1 January 2015 and becoming the nineteenth member of the currency union. Estonia, Latvia and now Lithuania have each been folded into a single monetary policy designed for everyone and therefore for no one, in the year that policy still could not lift the bloc out of stagnation.
5. The "simplification" that quietly binned clean air and recycling
A leaked draft revealed on 12 December that the famous deregulation drive meant axing the circular economy package and the clean air rules, then re-tabling them later under Brussels' own terms. Eleven governments wrote to Juncker asking him to keep them. The lesson is not that the laws were sacred, but that "better regulation" here meant centralising control over what gets dropped and what gets rewritten, with member states reduced to petitioners.
6. New rules on how your fish must introduce itself
From 13 December every fishmonger and supermarket counter in the EU had to display the commercial and scientific name of the species, whether it was caught or farmed, the FAO catch area and the fishing gear used. Twenty-eight national markets, harmonised down to the Latin name of a sardine, in case the citizen could not be trusted to buy a fish without Brussels reading him its biography.
7. Parliament tells the Commission to break up Google
Fresh from a late-November resolution, MEPs spent December basking in their call to "unbundle" search engines from their other services, a barely disguised demand to dismantle Google. The vote was non-binding and, as one competition blog drily put it, "playing for the gallery", but it set the tone for a decade of Brussels treating successful American firms as a problem to be managed rather than a market to be left alone.
8. Brussels keeps faith with Strasbourg, just not the human rights one
Having spent the month refusing to be judged by the European Court of Human Rights, the institutions dutifully reconvened in Strasbourg for the 15 to 18 December plenary, the monthly migration between Brussels and Strasbourg that costs taxpayers well over a hundred million euros a year. Two seats of power, one parliament, no appetite whatsoever to choose.
9. The Crimea sanctions that also banned European tourism there
On 18 December the Council tightened its Crimea measures, barring EU firms from investing in the peninsula, buying property or companies there, or offering tourism services. The cause was just, given Russia's annexation, yet the spectacle of Brussels solemnly forbidding Europeans from booking a Yalta holiday showed an institution that reaches for the regulation of private travel even in matters of war.
→ globalimportblog.bakermckenzie.com
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