Egypt’s President Mohamed Morsi, on the first visit of a democratically elected Egyptian President to the EU, declared that he was fully supporting the implementation of Fundamental Freedoms and Human Rights in Egypt. This is certainly good news for non-Muslim minorities. The Copts (descendants of the Egyptians before the Arab invasions) who make up some [...]

Renew the Olympic spirit of peace in sport! Athletes from around the world and the general public watching the Olympic opening events can all help. It started to go wrong forty years ago. In a terrorist attack at the Olympics in Munich in 1972, eleven Israeli athletes were murdered.  A German policeman also lost his [...]

Human Rights in the Middle East and North Africa? The European Union is going the right way — the extreme right way — to encourage Nazi ideology all along its southern borders.  It spends millions of tax-payers’ money in supporting a regime that is outrightly anti-Semitic and jihadist, that follows the Nazi model on racial [...]

How do you turn a country that has been ruled by a tyrant into one that respects human rights and is based solidly on democracy? That is more than possible. There is a positive example about how to bring it to success. Recently one country was rebuilt from a broken tyranny, ruined cities, and utter [...]

For the first time in decades, two Iranian warships plan to transit the Suez Canal on route for Syria. Israel has denounced this as a provocation. At a time when Egyptians are in a delicate state of political and religious turmoil this is a brazen signal of growing Persian outreach. It is directed at the [...]

Seventy years ago Europeans fought a war about theft of property. The Nazis were kleptocrats. The gang stole from everyone they could. It became a planetary war. In Germany Hitler disenfranchised many of his honest citizens. He stripped them of their wealth and then sent them with any persistent supporters, Jews, Christians, journalists or political [...]

1. The lost lorry How do you solve the following problem? A large lorry from a Member State of the EU arrives by ship at a port in Cyprus with goods for delivery. All the custom documents are in order according to EU legislation. Unfortunately the goods were intended for the Cypriot Greek south of [...]

After Robert Schuman’s warning of the Nazi destruction of the Jews, Why did those who were warned not act? August 1942 “The Jews are being systematically destroyed. There are no more Jews in the Ukraine. Men, women and children have been separated and taken. Men and women have been transported to concentration camps. Often they [...]

A Council protocol will aim to completely reverse the basic rule of European democracy defended passionately and with courage over decades by such European democrats as Robert Schuman, Paul-Henri Spaak and Joseph Luns. Many Commissioners in the past also fought an unequal battle to maintain democratic values against the return to raw, bare-knuckle, power politics. [...]