Special Reports

“Reporting on EU Affairs is boring, and it’s not the journalists’ fault,” said Giles Merritt, editor of the journal Brussels-based Europe’s World and Secretary General of the think-tank Friends of Europe.

Merritt’s remarks were made at the international symposium ‘Public Opinion and Europe’ held at the Diplomatic Academy on May 6 – 7, chaired by former Austrian Foreign Minister Peter Jankowitsch.

The following is an excerpt from an address by Ambassador Elisabeth Tichy-Fisslberger, “A compromise is nobodies darling” at an International Symposium on ‘Public Opinion and Europe’ on May 5.

Possibly the most frequent explanation for EU skepticism is that people apparently are under the impression (which journalists exploit) that Europe does not have the answers to all the questions that people are asking. They believe that Europe is setting the wrong priorities. This is primarily because Europe evolved as a business community of fairly well-off countries, and so concentrated at the beginning on questions of the market. What concerns the people of Europe however, are things like employment, the health system, education, pensions, social security and taxes.

On May 9, a group of French survivors of the Austrian concentration camp at Ebensee in Upper Austria returned to the site of their suffering to pay their respects to those who were never able to leave.

This June, Europeans in 27 countries have the opportunity to go to the polls and, in theory, vote on the future direction of the continent. Worryingly for the European Parliament, it’s likely that more than half of them won’t bother.

And there’s worse news for Brussels: those who do vote are likely to use the polling booth as a mid-term report card on the domestic performance of their national parties rather than as a comment on the future direction they would like Brussels to take.

For his first public speech abroad since his inauguration, Obama chose a suitably razzle-dazzle destination – Hradcany Square outside Prague Castle. I was among the thousands of people who turned up to listen to the U.S. President, dragging myself out of bed after a long night among the myriad charms of that beautiful city, and then queuing in the soft spring sunshine to catch a glimpse of the man who has dominated our headlines for so many months.

Organized crime and corruption still dominate life in Hungary, undiminished since the turf battles of the 1990s and early 2000s. Instead, groups and individuals have consolidated their strength, through connections to Hungarian leaders in government and business, to such an extent that many experts question the ability of the justice system to make any difference.

“If there are 300 murders, you call the police,” said Geza Finszter, a senior researcher at the National Institute of Criminology in Budapest. “If there are 30,000 murders, you look for another solution. Real justice is only possible in a fundamentally honest society. Only then it is possible to shift away from current practices and thus make crime unprofitable.”

“Everyone on the subway was aware of the Brennan incident,” said Paul Kojo, a native of Ghana who has lived in Austria for 23 years. “It always comes down to showing one’s ID. I have personally never had any confrontation with the police, only routine controls. I have been checked four times in over 20 years. But, most of my white friends have never been checked.

“Recently, these checks have been rampant. A friend of mine came to work angry the other day after having been pulled over by police. Colleagues were joking about him looking like a drug dealer.” But you have to understand the police point of view, too, he said. Coming from a police family, he sees routine checks as part of a policeman’s duty.

The hall of the 9th District Municipal Building was packed for the Dec. 6, 2008 presentation by Dr. Ilan Pappé of his book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, which had recently been published in German. The Israeli academic’s visit to Vienna was particularly timely: It was just three weeks before the latest round of intense violence began in the Middle East and tensions were already mounting.

For 22 days, rockets and mortars pounded Gaza in the military siege that began Dec. 27. It has been a brutal, one-sided assault, ending the lives of about 1,300 Palestinians and 13 Israelis, and bringing the peace process to a screeching halt.

On Jan. 18, Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert declared a unilateral ceasefire. A few hours later, the Hamas leadership in the Gaza Strip too declared a ceasefire, while demanding the Israeli Defense Forces withdraw from Gaza within a week and reopen all border crossings. Hostilities have ceased, but little has been won.

Manfred Nowak has dedicated his career to human rights. Currently acting as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, a professor of Constitutional Law and Human Rights at the University of Vienna, director of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Human Rights, the human rights lawyer is one of Austria’s leading human rights advocates.