Socialist Resistance

An archive of socialistresistance.org, 2002–2022

Batasuna ban: EU cracks down on democracy

by Piers Mostyn  |  Socialist Resistance no8  |  page 12

This is scanned newsprint, not web text. The original PDFs carried no text layer at all, so every word here was read off the page by OCR. Expect dropped opening letters, run-together words and wrong characters. There was no contents page to cut the paper up by, so the articles were found from the size of their headlines: a headline may carry its kicker, and where an article ran beside a boxed panel a few lines of the neighbour can appear. The scanned issue is the authority; this text is here so the words can be found at all.

The conference decided that the next step should be the drafting of an agreement

••. On June 5 the European Union added the militant Basque nationalist party Batasuna to its list of "terrorist organisations", obliging all EU states to give the "broadest possible assistance" to police and prosecutors. This follows a similar US decision in May after a Washington visit by Spanish state prime minister Aznar - his reward for The Madrid government itself outlawed Batasuna last year. 60 Batasuna mayors were deposed and 1,500 candidates removed from this year's local election list, disenfranchisThe party was originally banned not for being a terrorist organisation, but for infringing a new law forbidding parties from "encouraging violence". A different matter entirely. The repression has not gone without protest. A fortnight before the May election tens of thousands defied a government order to demonstrate in The EU decision was simply announced by the council of ministers as an administrative matter - without accountability or political discussion. This attack by the EU on a mass party with representation at the European level (Koldo Gorostiaga Atxalandabaso MEP) was not even debated by the Parliament itself, which appears to have done nothing since to object.

There are repercussions across Europe. The left is discussing its intervention into next year's Euro-elections. Who is to say what steps might be taken agairist others that are said to "encourage violence"? This is the fruit of 18 months of secret US-EU negotiation on "anti-terrorist" treaties, even as some of the states involved were publically denouncing war on Iraq. In a separate development, the Madrid government published a draft law in April that would make participation in public acts opposing military intervention in "armed conflict" by the state or an allied power a criminal offence punishable by between one and six years imprisonment. This internationally co-ordinated act of major political repression urgently calls for a broad based campaign of international opposition.