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| Frans Timmermans, Vice President of the European Commission. Photo: Flickr/Euranet Plus |
'The EU and Catalonia:
A non-epic tale of hypocrisy, hand-wringing, and getting it wrong'
by Susan Ram (Counterfire, Nov 2, 2017)
In fact, no condemnation of the barbarism directed at peaceful citizens seeking to cast their vote has been forthcoming from the higher echelons of the EU or from the leaders of its most influential member states. As Spanish ‘law and order’ proceeded to assert itself so brutally across Catalonia on October 1st, only a handful of European leaders raised their voice in protest. Jeremy Corbyn, Nicola Sturgeon and Charles Michel, the Belgian prime minister, were among the few who bothered. [...] Among its many considerable achievements, the Catalonian independence movement is revealing the European Union’s feet of clay.
As Aiden Hehir, Reader in International Relations at Manchester University, underlines:
“Article 1.2 of the UN charter recognises the principle of self-determination – making this a right which transcends any state’s domestic laws. A fundamental principle of international law is that the provisions of a state’s constitution cannot be deemed inherently legal – they must equate with international law. For example, a constitution may sanction racial discrimination or genocide, but this is superseded by the international laws which prohibit both. To claim that a state’s constitution is the sole determinant on the legality of action taken within that state is to essentially reject the very idea of international law.”
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