2017 – 052 EU press card to control all journalists

The European Union (EU) has proposing issuing an EU Press Card (EUPC) and to accredit journalists.

This will be to replace the existing International Federation of Journalists Card that is already universally accepted for a journalist to operate within the EU.

The accreditation and issuing of EUPCs will be controlled by the unelected European Commission (EC). They will decide who can and who cannot be an accredited journalist and who they will allow to have an EUPC.

If the journalist does not report all the activities of the EU in a very positive manner acceptable to the EC then the EC will have the legal right to confiscate their EUPC. The journalist will not then be able to work and report within the EU.

Taken out of the public domain for now but on the back burner for reintroducing later.

Alessandro Buttice, the lawyer who represents OLAF (an office of the EC) as its press spokesman, has sent out a 16 page document to the Brussels’ press corps advising them of how they should and should not report news about the EU.

There have been reports of newspaper advertisers being approached and asked to lean on the editors to be very EU friendly when reporting EU activities in their papers. Margot Wallstrom, who describes herself as the “Propaganda Commissioner” for the EC, has made a number of attempts to control and prohibit reporting of journalists who are not being ‘EU Friendly’.

In the UK the intention of the Leveson Inquiry, dominated by Common Purpose (2015 – 074), is to bring all British media, internet and TV under the full control of the Government and eventually the EU. Behind the front of Leveson their machinations were done in secret and completely undemocratically. The media would be liable for unlimited fines. Such actions would stop newspapers reporting articles very much in the public interest such as the MPs expenses scandal

THE European Court of Justice has already ruled in 2001 that the European Union can lawfully suppress political criticism of its institutions and of leading figures, sweeping aside English Common Law and 50 years of European precedents on civil liberties.

The EU’s top court found that the European Commission was entitled to sack Bernard Connolly, a British economist dismissed in 1995 for writing a critique of European monetary integration entitled The Rotten Heart of Europe. The ruling stated that the commission could restrict dissent in order to “protect the rights of others” and punish individuals who “damaged the institution’s image and reputation”. The case has wider implications for free speech that could extend to EU citizens who do not work for the Brussels bureaucracy.

The court called the Connolly book “aggressive, derogatory and insulting” (meaning that its contents were essentially true but not for the public to know), taking particular umbrage at the author’s suggestion that Economic and Monetary Union was a threat to democracy, freedom and “ultimately peace”. It’s well worth reading.

However, it dropped an argument put forward by the advocate-general, Damaso Ruiz-Jarabo Colomer, which implied that Mr Connolly’s criticism of the EU was akin to extreme blasphemy, and therefore not protected speech.