What you do speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say.
Ralph Emerson
Hypocrisy can afford to be magnificent in its promises, for never intending to go beyond promise, it costs nothing.
Edmund Burke
The hypocrisy of the European Institutions has been the focus of public debate ever since the resignation of President Jacques Santer’s Commission of the European Communities on 15 March 1999 (Anonymous (1999), BBC 1999, Butler 2002, Castle 2002, Heaton-Harris 2002, Martin 2002b, Evans-Pritchard 2003, Edmondson 2004, Martin 2004, Charter and Boyes 2007, Stute 2007, BBC 2008, Charter 2008e, EurActiv.com 2008b, European Ombudsman 2008, Hurst 2008, van Buitenen 2008, Waterfield 2008a).
However, I would like to raise the subject once again in view of today’s parliamentary vote on the election of the President of the next Commission of the European Communities (alias the European Commission) and the forthcoming second Irish referendum (Referendum Commission: Lisbon Treaty 2009 web site) on the proposed Treaty of Lisbon amending the Treaty on European Union and the Treaty establishing the European Community (hereafter the Treaty of Lisbon) (Conference of the Representatives of the Governments of the Member States 2007), which is currently pending ratification by four Member States (the Republic of Ireland, the Czech Republic, the Federal Republic of Germany and the Republic of Poland, for details see Apostolov 2009c) and which provides for the establishment of new European Institutions (Apostolov 2009b). The Commission of the European Communities and the European Parliament were selected for that purpose based on the outcomes of a preliminary screening.
A. Whistleblowing
As already outlined in Apostolov (2009b), in 1999 the Commission started an administrative reform aimed at, inter alia, improving and modernizing its financial management (Commission of the European Communities 2000). A part of this reform was the establishment of the European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF) (Commission of the European Communities 1999a) and of provisions for prevention of fraud, corruption and any illegal activity detrimental to the Communities’ interests within the Commission (Commission of the European Communities 1999b). The Council of the European Communities made similar provisions at that time (Council of the European Communities 1999). The Commission reiterated its intention “to better protect the Community’s financial interests” in 2000 (Commission of the European Communities 2000; see also European Commission 2006b) and introduced the term “whistleblowing” to stand for reporting by officials of suspicions and evidence of serious wrongdoing – irregularities such as fraud, corruption, other illegal activities or professional failures (Gahrton 2002, Martin 2002b). Finally, the 2004 amendment of the Staff Regulations of officials of the European Communities (Council of the European Communities 2004, Council of the European Communities 2005, Council of the European Communities 2007) extended the preventive provisions to apply to all officials of the institutions of the Communities and thus to the Members of the European Parliament as well. All these acts are said to enable and encourage the employees of the European Institutions to express concerns about serious wrongdoings coming to their attention while guaranteeing them protection from adverse consequences (Heaton-Harris 2002, Heaton-Harris 2003).
The author argues that the establishment of the OLAF as a unit to prevent fraud, corruption and other illegal activities within the Commission is not only sheer hypocrisy but also constitutes a conflict of interests because:
1) the OLAF is a Commission’s own department (European Parliament and European Council 1999) and, despite the pretended independence of its investigative function (Commission of the European Communities 1999a, European Parliament and European Council 1999), the Office is located “in the commission building, on the commission’s computer network and works with commission investigators” (Stute 2007);
2) its Director, whose responsibility is to decide whether or not to open an investigation following a report of suspicions and evidence of fraud, corruption, other illegal activities or professional failures, is appointed by the Commission after a selection procedure which does not even require the publication of the call for applications in the Official Journal of the European Communities, respectively – the Official Journal of the European Union (Commission of the European Communities 1999a, European Parliament and European Council 1999), and is thus anything else but transparent and democratic.
Given the above facts it is not to wonder that there are serious concerns about OLAF’s integrity in terms of its internal investigating function aimed at disclosing serious wrongdoing in the European Institutions and in particular in the Commission of the European Communities (Watt 2002, Stute 2007). “OLAF’s independence exists only on paper”, said Paul van Buitenen (Stute 2007), the well-known whistleblower and fighter against fraud and corruption in the European Institutions (Edmondson 2004, BBC 2008, Wikipedia), more than seven years after the establishment of the office. He alleged incompetence in and interference with the work of the OLAF (European Voice 2008) and even went as far as calling the office “a mess” (EurActiv.com 2008d).
In an attempt to avoid this conflict of interests, in the course of its reform the Commission provided for external channels for reporting illegal activities and professional failures, which were described as a “safety valve” (Commission of the European Communities 2000). However, this provision itself is also nothing but hypocrisy since the regulations governing the use of external reporting channels explicitly require that the officials report their suspicions and evidence first to OLAF (either directly or through their superiors) (Council of the European Communities 2004, Council of the European Communities 2005, Council of the European Communities 2007).
It is based exactly on these fake “external reporting channels” and on false pretences of disregarded loyalty that officials who made public cases of fraud and corruption in the European Institutions are punished – a typical example is the case of Andreasen, who was dismissed from the Commission for having exposed accounting irregularities in the European Union’s budget which she honestly and reasonably believed to be substantially true (Castle 2002, Butler 2002, Martin 2002b, Commission of the European Communities 2004b).
The European Parliament is another typical example of hypocrisy as the following examples show:
a) despite the fact that the Members of the European Parliament receive their salaries from the taxpayers’ money, the MEPs are very reluctant to reveal their salaries to the public (European Ombudsman 2008);
b) while the MEPs have expressed genuine interest in exposing illegal activities in the European Institutions on various occasions (Meijer 2001a, Meijer 2001b, Meijer 2001c, Gahrton 2002, Heaton-Harris 2002, Martin 2002a, Martin 2002b, Meijer 2002, EurActiv.com 2003, Heaton-Harris 2003) and have even accused the Commission of covering up a “vast enterprise of looting” (Evans-Pritchard 2003), fraud and cover-ups are no strangers to the MEPs themselves as revealed by a recent audit report on misuse of expenses by the MEPs (van Buitenen 2008; for a digest see Waterfield 2008a) described in Apostolov (2009b).
c) the MEPs’ reaction to van Buitenen’s publication of the summary of the report (Charter 2008e, Hurst 2008, Waterfield 2008a) clearly demonstrates that their concerns about financial misuse in the European Institutions are sheer hypocrisy.
B. Phoney Loyalty
It is not uncommon for the European Institutions to accuse of disloyalty employees who have exposed illegal activities in the institutions. For example, when dismissing Andreasen from the Commission for having exposed accounting irregularities in the European Union’s budget, the Commission wrote in a press release:
Ms Andreasen has repeatedly and knowingly acted in disregard of her obligations, particularly those … of the duty of loyalty incumbent upon every official.
(Commission of the European Communities 2004b)
Similarly, MEPs have criticized van Buitenen for making public the results of the Parliament’s internal audit report, motivating their positions with a non-disclosure clause they had signed:
a) “If I’ve signed for it, then I would keep it confidential” said J. Mulder, a Dutch MEP (BBC 2008);
b) M. Schulz, a German MEP, has said that the disclosure of the information displayed a disregard for internal rules (EurActiv.com 2008b).
Based on their interpretation of loyalty, the European Institutions have reprimanded and dismissed employees as for example in the cases of van Buitenen (BBC 2008) and Andreasen (Commission of the European Communities 2004b).
In the author’s opinion, this interpretation of loyalty is in fact a misinterpretation since the employees of the European Institutions must be loyal in the first place to their sovereign, the European taxpayers, and in the second place to the principles laid down in the treaties founding the European Communities and in the respective amending acts. He argues that criminal activities in the institutions may not be covered up by provisions for secrecy, and employees may not be punished based on accusations of disregard of phoney loyalty. It is therefore the author’s hope that this publication will initiate a debate on the interpretation of loyalty by the institutions.
C. “Double-Entry Bookkeeping”
In spite of the provisions for “respect for … the rule of law” and “right of access to European Parliament, Council and Commission documents” in the Treaty establishing the European Community, and contrary to the continuous adoption of policies and measures aimed at increasing transparency of the European Institutions and improving public access to their documents (Commission of the European Communities 2008, European Commission: Transparency website), there are indications that some institutions are not truly interested in the implementation of these provisions, policies and measures.
For example, in January 2009 the Directorate-General Trade of the Commission circulated internally a manual on access to information (WikiLeaks), in which the employees are advised to:
1) interpret requests for access as literally and as narrowly as possible, e.g. officials do not have to “reply to requests for information rather than documents per se” and “[w]hen the released document also covers issues which were not mentioned in the applicant’s request, the parts that are not relevant to the request will not be disclosed” (emphasis original) (WikiLeaks);
2) prepare two different versions of a meeting report:
– a factual report to be released in reply to a request for access to information;
– an assessment report, containing the official’s personal evaluation of the meeting, his/her opinion on the real intentions of one or more participants, an assessment of the situation and possibly suggestions for follow-up.
Pia Eberhardt of the Corporate Europe Observatory called the manual a “scandalous” attempt to “legitimise DG Trade’s recurrent attempts to shield evidence of its liaisons with corporate lobbyists from information requests”; the Commission, on its part, defended the manual by stating “[a]ctually we think these are good instructions. It makes clear that no category of documents is excluded [from the regulation]” (Mahony 2009).
D. Combating Climate Change
The gravest example of hypocrisy is the shuttling of the Members of the European Parliament between the Parliament’s two official seats in Brussels and Strasbourg which was already mentioned in Apostolov (2009b). These trips have been reported to result in the release of about 20000 tonnes of CO2 per year (Eco-Logica Ltd 2007; see also The Greens 2007). Despite the Community’s legal commitment to cuts its greenhouse gas emissions and the MEP’s requests for more stringent long-term climate goals (EurActiv 2009b), and contrary to a petition which gathered one million signatures within a few months in 2006 only (Oneseat.eu, EurActiv.com 2006) and a written declaration signed by 286 (or 38,9% of all) MEPs (Alvaro et al. 2008) to put an end to the European Parliament’s commuting between Brussels and Strasbourg, the Parliament has done nothing to hear the voice of the taxpayers and to discontinue its environment deteriorating shuttling practice (Alvaro et al. 2008, see also Corbett 2009).
However, the European Parliament is not alone in its hypocritical fight against climate change: for example, Meglena Kuneva – the European Commissioner for Consumer Affairs from Bulgaria – is reported to have said that she had been travelling every week to Bulgaria this year (NDSV Silistra 2009).
Conclusion
The above findings clearly demonstrate that the hypocrisy of the European Institutions not only shakes the foundations of the European Community by undermining basic principles such as democracy and the rule of law but also results in considerable losses to the community budget and, hence, to the European taxpayers. Dealing with this issue offers every prospect of increasing the transparency and streamlining the spending of the institutions, and of enhancing democracy in the Community on the whole.
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