But the cynicism was warranted on Monday, when the EU condolence-o-matic seemed to be malfunctioning for some reason. There was no solemn communique of sympathy, no moment of silence, not even a bland message carefully crafted by PR flunkies recommitting to “Never again” do this or that on the evening of 2-3 of August, the night of Roma Extermination Remembrance, the international date for commemoration of the Gypsy and Sinti victims of the Pharrajimos or Samudaripen, the two Romani words used to describe the Holocaust.

Because you see, Monday is just not the right day to do so. But maybe next year one of the EU presidents will, so long as the date does not also awkwardly coincide with a wave of expulsions and new laws targetting the Roma as it so inopportunely does this year.

In the past week, we have learnt that French President Sarkozy announced he is to destroy 300 Roma encampments and expel Roma from French territory, that Germany said it wants to expel 12,000 Gypsies, including 6,000 children and adolescents back to Kosovo, that Sweden in violation of domestic and EU law is deporting Roma for begging, that Copenhagen has asked the Danish government for assistance including the use of force to expel Roma, and that a caravan of 700 travellers were chased out of Flanders.

All this atop the Czech and Slovak practice of automatically sending Roma children to ‘special schools’ for the mentally handicapped, Italy’s 2008 declaration of a state of emergency due to the presence of Roma that saw the eviction of thousands of them, mainly to Romania and Bulgaria, and the murder last year of eight Roma in Hungary by individuals linked to the country’s far-right.

So right now really would not be a good time to be remembering the 66th anniversary of the liquidation by the Germans on the night of 2-3 August, 1944, of 2,897 men, women and children corralled into the Zigeunerfamilienlager , or ‘Gypsy family camp’, at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

One might be thought to be drawing inconvenient attention to the similarity of what happened so many decades ago and the government-orchestrated attacks that Europe’s largest and most oppressed minority face across the continent today.

As Anneliese Baldaccini, a lawyer with Amnesty’s EU office, told me: “There is a clear and systemic programme of EU governments targetting Roma. This is a moment of great concern right now.”

It is a shame that the date is so uncomfortably unseasonable, because the EU actually has very considerable powers to put a stop to it all, in a way that no actors had seven decades ago.

At the heart of the EU treaty lies the ultimate sanction Brussels can apply to any member state: diplomats call it the ‘nuclear option’. Under Article 7 of the EU Treaty, which states that in cases of a “serious and persistent breach” of human rights, penalties up to the withdrawal of voting rights in the European Council and even expulsion from the union can be imposed.

Amnesty believes now is time to act. “The EU under the Lisbon Treaty under Articles, 2, 6 and 7 has the responsibility to address human rights within the 27 member states,” said the group’s executive officer for legal affairs in the European Union, Susanna Mehtonen.

But the European Commission, which like the European Council and the European Parliament, have the power to invoke such sanction, wants to stay as far away as possible from the issue. On Thursday, the spokesman for commissioner Viviane Reding, the justice commissioner, Matthew Newman, said: “When it comes to Roma and the possibility of expelling them, this is up to the member states to deal with, in this case France, and for them to decide how they are going to implement the law.”

When the Charter of Fundamental Rights came into force with the passage of the Lisbon Treaty last year, the EU heralded the moment as a new dawn for human rights in Europe. The member of the commission responsible for the justice dossier was now also to become explicitly the “fundamental rights” commissioner, under pressure from the Liberals in the European Parliament.

Indeed, in April at a European Commission conference on the Roma issue, commissioner Reding called discrimination against the continent’s largest minority “unacceptable”.

But at the very moment when a deluge of government assaults is unleashed on the community in so many EU states, Brussels has gone silent.

The charter, the commission now clarifies, is not a bill of rights for citizens, but is instead just an instrument covering two very narrow areas: acts of the EU institutions themselves and EU member states when they implement EU law. The moves of France and other countries in this case thus lie outside their responsibility, they insist.

What is curious is that, applying this same strict reading, the commission also has no competence in defending the rights of gays and lesbians, except insofar as there is a breach of charter in these two situations, yet gay rights, long established in western European metropoles but not in much of eastern Europe, are monthly fairly robustly defended by the institutions.

In May, Reding’s office wrote to Vilnius to complain how a lower court had banned a gay pride rally. “The commission is concerned about the recent developments,” said the letter. Just days later, Lithuania’s top court ensured that the march could go ahead after all. European Council President Herman Van Rompuy also sent a “strong message condemning homophobia” to this year’s Baltic Pride.

The difference in the two situations is that there is an unspoken hierarchy within the bloc between the new eastern European states and the economic powerhouses in the west. Brussels can contentedly slap the wrists of eastern capitals without fear of consequence. The same cannot be said when the EU executive goes up against a Sarkozy or a Berlusconi.

It is not that the commission does not believe that such a flagrant breach of human rights is occurring. “This is the sort of thing that Sarkozy used to make his name. He’s really low in the polls now, so he’s using the same tactics. It worked before. And it’s really popular everywhere,” one commission official told me.

“It is possibly the most sensitive issue there is,” the official added, recalling when another spokesman last year lightly suggested that Italy might want to explain why it had deported a boatload of refugees to Libya. Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi at the time threatened to veto all actions of the European Council if the commission did not fire the spokesman for having the temerity of encouraging Rome to apply the law.

So this time around, “A decision was made to give a very institutional response.”

The commission privately argues that as for the “nuclear option” of invoking Article 7,  “This is for rounding up all the gypsies and putting them in concentration camps. We’re not anywhere near there yet.”

But a Holocaust, or Pharrajimos or Samudaripen, does not arrive suddenly one day ex nihilo, returned from a long break in the Bahamas and knocking on Barroso’s door to announce himself: “Hello, Jose-Manuel? It’s Cousin Fascism! I’m baaack! What’s for tea? Oooh, lookie, lookie – austerity, mass unemployment! I do love this season in the economic cycle!” Fascism arrives slowly, quietly, by a steady but still recognisable tightening of the screws. Europe must act now before concentration camps do appear. In any case, they won’t be called concentration camps or look anything like them. Maltese and Greek detention centres for sub-Saharan irregular migrants were not built with cast-iron gates at their entrance emblazoned ‘Arbeit macht frei‘, though concentration camps are indeed what they are. Leaders will avoid such archetypically fascist language or forms of action so that they and Brussels can always claim that what is happening is “completely different”.

Under Article 7, precise penalties in advance of the level of withdrawal of voting rights or expulsion are not spelled out, so there is still considerable room for Brussels to manoeuvre. No one is expecting that France be kicked out of the EU. At the very least, could Reding not send a letter similar to that which she sent to Lithuania when the gay pride march was banned?

Or maybe next year, maybe gypsies could just organise a float during the Love Parade to get the EU to notice them.

Antipodean quotidien The Australian, part of arch Palestinian partisan Rupert Mudoch’s stable of pamphlets, actually sticks mention of the gong in its headline: ‘Nobel Peace Prize winner David Trimble to monitor Israel’s Gaza flotilla inquiry’.

Sounds lovely, doesn’t it? Who could be more hard-assed on the Israelis than a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, and one from Northern Ireland to boot? One of the passengers on the MV Rachel Corrie, the Johnny-come-lately Irish flotilla boat, was even a Nobel winner as well. I’m sure he was mortified to hear about the IDF’s capture of another initiate of the Nobel fellowship.

Or perhaps not. What goes without mention in most other reports (although not in the EUobserver’s article or that of Israeli daily Haaretz) is that on the very day that Israel attacked the convoy, 31 May, Lord Trimble was in Paris founding the international “Friends of Israel Initiative”, alongside Spain’s right-wing and hair-helmeted former PM, Jose Maria Aznar.

First reported in the Jerusalem Post (although since then, the article has mysteriously been removed from the site [still available here]), the meeting was also addressed by Dore Gold, former Israeli ambassador to the UN and ex-advisor to Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu, and John Bolton, a neo-conservative’s neo-conservative, Bush’s ambassador to the UN and opponent of the International Criminal Court.

The Initiative aims to counter the “unprecedented delegitimation campaign against Israel, driven by the enemies of the Jewish state and perversely assumed by numerous international authorities,” according to a statement. One presumes that the latter band of villains the group’s statement mentions is the UN and EU,  so is Baron Trimble and Co. suggesting that Europe is out to delegitimate the Jewish state? EU foreign minister meeting today and discussing the proposal might like to take this into account.

They might also like to consider how Ulster Unionism has historically strongly backed Israel against the Palestinians, both in kneejerk reaction to the IRA’s support for the PLO (just as Loyalists backed apartheid South Africa while their opponents backed the ANC)  and also from the ideology’s ties to evangelical protestantism, as pointed out on the Northern Irish Slugger O’Toole blog.

As quoted in the Down Democrat, the weekly local paper from Downpatrick, County Down, Baron Trimble’s associate and deputy leader of the Ulster Unionist Party Danny Kennedy said in the wake of the attack on the convoy: “Given our experience of terrorism and how it was dealt with in Northern Ireland, I think that a section of the unionist population have more than a sneaking regard for the manner in which the Israeli Government defends Israel and puts its security considerations above all others.”

Upon joining the House of Lords in 2006, Trimble was sponsored by the late Baron Steinberg of Belfast, until his death the honorary president of Northern Ireland Friends of Israel, a group who a few days ago put out a statement swallowing the Israeli PR line whole, demanding that the activists from the Free Gaza Movement “must explain why they are associating with a protest where lead members call for ‘death to the Jews’, and which aims to give Hamas unrestricted ability to import missiles from Iran.”

But what of Brigadier-General Ken Watkin, the cuddly Canadian military judge advocate general and second international observer appointed to chaperone the Israeli committee? It turns out the good brigadier back in November refused to answer questions from a Canadian House-of-Commons committee of inquiry into rendition and torture of prisoners in Afghan jails.

The soldier’s stonewalling extended to refusing to tell the committee whether he had read his government’s own foreign affairs department reports on the Afghanistan’s poor human rights record and even newspaper articles that contained torture allegations.

All indications are the EU will endorse the Israeli proposal for an inquiry, with the quid pro quo being a lightening of the blockade (although not the lifting of it). The US has already given its blessing. The conclusions of the meeting of European foreign ministers, which were published only a minute ago, say: “To command the confidence of the international community, this should include credible international participation.”

With Europe all-fur-coat-and-no-knickers when it comes to human rights, as Amnesty International wrote last week in its annual report (ok – so they didn’t use the word ‘knickers’ in the 2010 State of the World’s Human Rights document, preferring the more diplomatic but still damning: ‘It is sadly still the case that the reality of protection from human rights abuses for many of those within [Europe’s] borders falls short of the rhetoric.’) having already abandoned calls for an international inquiry, we will soon see whether the bloc considers Trimble and Watkins ‘credible’.

Appointing to the inquiry as observers these two muppets – who will in any case only take part in the hearings and subsequent discussions, but will not vote on any conclusions – is as serious as appointing a pair of experts from the International Brotherhood of Persnickety Closeted Roommates to an investigation of a drunken, late-night jealous assault by Bert on Ernie.

See what Reuters has cropped from the image! Ernie is actually wielding a Luger!

But I’m not even talking about the hypocrisy of rhetoric versus action, say, as in the EU’s recent approach to the coup in Honduras, as evident as this may be. No, I mean just the scorn toward responsible government found in the vernacular of the Bruxellois coterie of diplomats, lobbyists, think-tankies and fonctionnaires that is as unremarkable and quotidian as the mangling of English found in a commission press release. For all the gilded phraseology and bouquet of prizes that are handed out, guffaws at the amateurishness of the European Parliament, the idiocy of referendum-voting electorates and democracy in general are so common as to be almost unnoticeable.

Western democracies’ as a whole have shifted policy making largely away from contestatory parliamentary chambers, and toward instead technocratic bodies of experts – such as international financial institutions, the European Central Bank and the commission – or entities that may have elected politicians as members but whose decisions are never confronted with the check of a popular ballot – such as the European Council, the Council of Ministers and the G20. Technocratic as opposed to popular decision-making has become such a norm over the last 30 years that contempt for democracy is probably in most quarters even unconscious.

The week before last, in a discussion of the EU’s failure at the Copenhagen climate summit in December and its climate strategy for the coming year hosted by the Friends of Europe think-tank, this hatred for democracy was on full display. But due to this attitude’s aforementioned ubiquity, no one noticed at all.

Some of this will a bit disappear-up-your-own-climate-bumhole jargony, but bear with me.

There’s no gotcha moment here, mind. Just further examples of how European elites would prefer to craft policy far away from the reaches of democratic oversight.

In a recent analysis piece for the EUobserver and the Nordic Council, I argued essentially that the EU was taking the same line as the US in the wake of Copenhagen regarding the sidelining of the UN process in favour of fora that are much more manageable (read: no awkward squad present) such as the Major Economies Forum, the G8 or possibly the UN High-Level Panel on Climate Change and Development, announced by Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon last September and to be launched early this year. The difference between Washington and Brussels is that the former announces that it will sideline the UN process and then proceed to do so, while the latter will declaim: ‘Why, mercy me, we’d never even think of sidelining the UN’ while doing precisely that.

The man the audience, composed as far as I could see mainly of lobbyists (both industry and green) and journalists were there to hear, Karl Falkenberg, head of the commission’s Environment Directorate-General, pretty much confirmed this.

“The key is which track to negotiate – under the UNFCCC, there is the LCA [Long-term co-operative action - the track that deals with those countries that are not party to the Kyoto Protocol[, the KP [the Kyoto Protocol], and now an informal, additional track, or that might become a track,” he said, the third track referring to the Copenhagen Accord.

“And what do you do with three tracks? Eventually, you want one framework and reduction targets for everyone. We need ideas, concepts about how we go about negotiating this.”

Though all of what he just said means nothing less than the scrapping of the Kyoto Protocol, and the forced inclusion of the Copenhagen Accord, agreed to outside the UN process, Falkenberg was officially adamant that the UN process continue.

“If we want rapid solutions, it’s not good to scrap anything, especially the UNFCCC. A large number of our partners will make it a red line. The Basic countries will make it an absolute red line on the KP and LCA. That’s a very hard position to deal with at the moment.”

But then, in the same breath, he said, misquoting Mao: “But we should look at every other opportunity  … Let a million flowers bloom.”

If there’s still any question about how the commission thinks of climate negotiations, one only has to consider the character of Falkenberg himself. Before heading up the Environment DG, he was for 30 years ensconced in the commission’s trade department, and it shows. The commission, and the EU as a whole, essentially views climate negotiations as trade negotiations of another kind, and the same high-stakes, divide-and-rule tactics evident in its trade dealings with developing countries is identical to the way the EU manoeuvres in this arena.

He mentioned that money – that is to say climate finance – is “a big issue” and that there is now a need to find actors that the EU wants to support in friendly countries, especially those in the most vulnerable countries. In the lead up to Copenhagen, we increasingly began to the term ‘most vulnerable countries’ tripping off the forked tongues of rich-country leaders. It sounds cuddly and thoughtful, but the reality is that in focussing on the very poorest of the poor, the tuppence of a few billion euros, even if entirely inadequate for the task at hand, is incredibly attractive. Better a bird in the hand than two in the non-drought-resistant bush. In this way, the wealthy countries hope to peel off a flush of really impoverished states. By jamming a wedge between them and other developing countries, they a) undermine the unity that managed to block attempts to kill off the Kyoto Protocol at Copenhagen; b) are able to wheel around these couple of really-truly pov-o countries as proof that they are The Ones That Really Care while the likes of the G77 and Alba states are climate dilletantes; and c) place most of the emphasis on climate adaptation instead of the much more expensive climate mitigation.

Be prepared to hear a lot more from Europe on the ‘most vulnerable countries’. Already, Brown and Barroso cannot seem to bring themselves to talk about climate without talking about these ‘MVCs’.

Jo Leinen, the German social democrat chair of the parliament’s environment committee and former radical involved in the Anti-AKW- anti-nuclear movement and the peace movement in the eighties, was ostensibly on the other side in the Friends of Europe debate, and he played the role sufficiently well, insisting that the EU remove the conditionality attached to its 30 percent greenhouse gas emissions reduction offer, a move we all know the commission is opposed to.

But Container-Jo, as he used to be called when he was in the habit of climbing atop nuclear containers with the megaphone, on the question of negotiations themselves could have been reading from the same script as Falkenberg.

“We need another plan for diplomacy for the next few months, a strategic plan for how to get agreement of the main actors,” he said, underscoring, like Falkenberg, financing for especially “the African Union and least developed countries – not just paper money, but real money. We have to create an instrument for delivering this by Mexico [the next UN climate summit in December], so they have more trust.”

This must be done because “five states could block and those that did are likely to block again because they have another agenda.”

Here, Leinen is repeating the myth EU bods keep repeating to themselves: that opposition to the Copenhagen Accord was limited to the socialist awkward squad of Chavez, Morales and co. He even went on to repeat that horrid phrase I have heard over and over again since I got back from Copenhagen: “Coalition of the willing.”

“Europe has to think about a Plan B, a coalition of the willing – those countries wanting to act to make something even while we wait for the UN a little bit to make a global deal.”

Even a broken clock is right twice a day, and in the audience was a slightly potty old dude from the European Ba’hai Business Forum. In this case his hobby horse is clearly the creation of a UN Parliamentary Assembly, which he asked about, mentioning the north/south divide, and whether this was not a solution.

Now I have to say that I’m not really down with the crew of milquetoasts who fetishise the UN. We have to be recognise that the UN is as much a tool of the great powers as any other international institution and should not be set up in our minds as some sort of counterweight to the great powers. Herein lies the frustration I have with one of the arguments against the Iraq war: that it was illegal. It may well have been, but if the UN in the end had given the war the green light, would that really have made everything tickety-boo? Would the imprimatur of the UN mean that the perhaps a million dead Iraqis is now an acceptable death toll?

That said, I am with the General Assembly over the Security Council and were a parliamentary assembly at the UN to materialise, I would think it important to spend some energy supporting such a chamber over the anti-democratic UNSC as well. In any case, as pie in the sky as such a development may be, climate change is the sine qua non of international issues that cry out for some sort of international governance structure.

Elites themselves are under no illusion about the necessity of building such structures and are fast in the process of doing so, cf. the G20, but they cannot countenance the idea that they be democratically accountable to citizens.

And however barmy Mr Baha’i Businessman might have been, he’s not actually wrong in pointing to something along the lines of a UN Parliamentary Assembly as the sort of forum where such international questions as climate change should be addressed.

But responding to the old man, Giles Merritt, moderator of the ‘debate’ and head of the Friends of Europe, guffawed: “Do we need another layer of democracy in the world?”
The room erupted in hearty laughter, especially from Falkenberg. I felt bad for the white-haired gentleman, who, crestfallen at seeing the Important Men laughing at his expense, creaked back into his chair.

Having to answer him, Falkenberg said: “Copenhagen has been rather painful. It was not a negotiating environment. It was more like a ‘happening’, like Woodstock without the mud.”

“And without the sex!” awkwardly added Merritt, but this time to little laughter.

“I’m not sure this is a conducive environment,” continued Falkenberg. “If we see the same sort of ‘happenings’ at Cancun, we will have to seriously rethink this forum.”

But as for moving discussions to a UN Parliamentary Assembly? “I’m all for having parliamentary involvement, but in a parliamentary democracy, there is a division of labour between the parliament and the executive role. If we try to negotiate, Swiss direct democracy style, good luck! I’ll be dead by the time you reach an agreement.”

Democracy at the international level?! Hoo boy! That’s a good one! Oh stop, I’m gonna pee!

Here, the euphemism of ‘being economical with the truth’ is inverted: when delivering spending announcements, governments are rather too bountiful with the truth.

The European Union’s announcement of over €400 million in emergency assistance to Haiti in the wake of its cataclysmic earthquake is an object lesson in this sort of funding announcement flimflammery – and, equally, how journalists can be unwitting or witting accomplices in this deceit.

Last Monday, after an extraordinary meeting of development ministers from across the EU, newly installed foreign affairs grand poobah Catherine Ashton, foreign minister for Spain (which currently holds the bloc’s six-month rotating presidency) and outgoing development commissioner Karel de Gucht announced that the bloc in total was offering over €400 million for Haiti, from both EU member states and the European Commission. All told, the funds announced on the 18th amounted to €429 million.

But just a cursory interrogation of what makes up this funding reveals that genuinely new cash amounts to, at most €115 million, and could well be much less than that.

The headline figure for emergency aid the commission was hoping journalists would pick up on was, according to John Clancy, development spokesman: ‘by the end of the week, the package of commission money comes to €30 million’. Of this, just €19 million, which was to be dispersed immediately, was genuinely fresh funding. Atop this, €8 million was previously announced funds from the European Community Humanitarian aid Office (ECHO) that was being redirected, and another €3 million that had been announced within 24 hours of the quake.The €3 million at the time was new money, but now was being announced again as part of a larger ‘package’

EU member states also announced €96 million of their own funds for emergency relief (the Council communication originally read €92 million, but a Council press officer told us that this was a misprint and that it actually amounted to €96 million. Some publications have however reported the €92 million figure). According to Catherine Ashton’s spokesman, Lutz Guelllner, most member states committed funds. No one had, or was willing to hand out, a schedule of which member states gave what amount of cash. Guellner told me that he thought that most of this was genuinely new money, but he was not 100 percent sure. The only way to find out would be to call each of the 27 member states’ permanent representations and hope that after hours of work trying to get a hold of the person responsible, I would get the complete picture. There was no time before deadline to do this, so I took Guellner at his word about the €96 million, but this may yet not be the case.

Beyond immediate emergency aid, the commission also announced €107 million for short to mid-term rehabilitation and reconstruction efforts and a further €200 million for long-term reconstruction that would be alloted once the worst of the crisis has past.

This further €307 million however did not represent new money, but cash redirected from existing development funds ‘a lot of which was already programmed for Haiti,’ Clancy told me. ‘Instead of being spent on training teachers, it’ll now be spent on building schools; instead of training nurses, it’ll be used to build clinics.’

Despite all this, almost all news outlets dutifully reported that the EU was giving €400 million, from the Financial Times, the Guardian, Voice of America, to Xinhua – just to give a few examples. With such a volume of papers reporting this, it becomes history.

The same thing has happened with the $100 billion fund within the Copenhagen Accord agreed (outside the legal UN process) at the UN climate summit in December. Every outlet now just refers to this as an established fact, but the reality is that this is a mix of public and private monies. According to a commission spokesperson, the breakdown is understood to be the same as that which lay within a commission proposal on climate finance dating back to September – that is, of this, €22-50 billion would come from the public purse, depending on whether a metric of ability to pay or historic emissions was used to decide how to share out the burden of paying into the fund. Realistically, the lower of the range is the most likely. Of this €22, the EU is committed to ‘paying its fair share’, which is generally understood to amount to about a third of this, with a similar share coming from the US and the rest from other industrialised powers – and even from emerging economies as well. So the real EU commitment would amount to just €7-17 billion a year to pay for adaptation and mitigation. The World Bank has estimated that mitigation alone is likely to cost $400 billion a year by 2030 and adaption $75 billion.

But everywhere it keeps being reported that the rich world is offering a sum of $100 billion a year for climate adaptation and mitigation. This is a whopper of a porky pie that serves specific ends, namely making the rich world look generous at the climate negotiating table and developing world refuseniks as unreasonable.

Ashton at least said that all of the Haiti cash will come in the form of grants rather than loans, with no no economic or political strings attached – ‘as far as I know’.

This is refreshing in comparison to the International Monetary Fund, whose monies of $100 million in emergency cash came in the form of loans via the organisation’s extended credit facility, which will have to be paid back and with conditions that will include hiking electricity prices, public sector wage freezes and keeping a lid on inflation.