Europe sets up paramilitary police force

Thursday, 18 October 2007

While all eyes are watching the European Constitution summit in Lisbon, a very different treaty has quietly been signed in Holland, where a group of EU countries approved the creation of a European Gendarmerie Force.

"What we have here is a fully fledged paramilitary police force," says Gerard Batten, UK Independence Party Euro MP and spokesman on Home Affairs.

The treaty describes the organisation as a "multinational police force with military status" and its use is for "both external and internal actions".

What is more, this force will outrank local police forces when it goes about its duties, which include security and public order missions, public surveillance, traffic regulations, border policing and general intelligence work and "performing criminal investigation work, including detecting offences, tracing offenders and transferring them to the appropriate judicial authorities".

Mr. Batten said: "To add insult to injury, the organisation will be exempt from taxation, both direct and indirect. More worrying still, however, is the fact that the treaty makes plain that the European gendarmerie is a supra-national force, in the way that its communications and archives will be treated as secret, and it will operate with diplomatic status.

"Once an operation has started in a 'host' country, that country will have no jurisdiction over the activities of the force."

Mr Batten concluded: "Although the UK did not sign up to this treaty today, the fact that Gordon Brown is talking about 'opt-ins' to EU justice and home affairs issues advises us to be very wary.

"Previous experience teaches us that we eventually get these things through the back door"

The Treaty Establishing the European Gendarmerie Force

From The European Union Project Oct 2006 see2007-4

Eurogendfor (EGF) – who on earth are they? You may well ask!

It seems that hardly any EU personnel in Brussels have heard of them either and they've only been stumbled upon by chance. They are the Euro Gendarmerie, a paramilitary force commanded by a Brigadier-General Gerard Deanez, and a rather shadowy group with a very sinister potential. The EGF seems to be modelled almost directly on the French Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité (CRS) who were first established in 1944, reorganised in 1948 and still on active duty today (ref. 2006-98). The CRS have a most unpleasant reputation for the uncompromising and very aggressive manner with which they suppress civil demonstrations and unrest. Once the final EU treaty is signed we will lose our veto and they can then be deployed on the streets of Britain.

JANINE DI GIOVANNI IN PARIS London Evening Standard Friday 10th April 2008

I was getting ready to take my son to the Olympic flame parade. My husband, Bruno, had phoned an hour before, making sure we would be there. We never made it to the parade, which turned into a kind of riot. My husband called me instead from the hospital. "I’ve been beaten up by the police," he said in a strange voice. "But I’m OK." Like most men, he underplayed the truth. He had not just been beaten up but stomped on, punched and thrown to the ground. They dislocated his shoulder and made his face look like a boxer’s.

The four policemen who did it were members of the special national riot police, the CRS, swaggering enforcers. "They are the dumbest and the strongest," is how one journalist friend describes them. Two held him back and two punched him out.

So why did they do it? My husband was not even one of the protesters. He is simply a French journalist who was part of the team given access to film the Olympic flame. So much for Olympic spirit. With karma like this, what’s going to happen in Beijing this summer?

And my husband is no-wimp. It’s not the first time he’s been beaten up —he was African correspondent for his network for three years, based in war-torn ivory Coast. But it’s one thing to get beaten up in Abidjan. It’s another thing in Paris.

This is the creepy side to France. England has no such branch of the police neither does America. Is France afraid of freedom of the press? His TV channel, France 2, is suing the Ministry of the Interior. My husband goes to court tomorrow for the first time, but by some bizarre French law, he has to confront his attackers alone. He is not allowed to bring a lawyer while they have their initial "confrontation" in which they will try to provoke him to say he started the fight.

It’s pretty unlikely, given the photographic evidence of them picking him out of the crowd. A photographer documented every moment with stills and someone else shot video.

He calls out "I’m a journalist!" "We don’t give a s*** one of the cops spits as he whacks him.

The images are now all over the web. There is also Bruno’s own footage, which shows the camera rolling to the ground and records the sounds of the blows and the shouts.

There was a time when a reporter’s presence was akin to waving a white flag. No one deliberately targeted them. Not anymore. And worst of all, it happened in France— land of liberté, fraternite and La Vie en Rose.