EU court further limits blacklisting authority

The European Court of Justice (ECJ) set a high bar this summer for justifying individual sanctions against terrorist financiers by tossing an appeal of the court’s earlier decision on sanctions against Yasin al-Qadi, the Saudi multimillionaire creator of the Muwafaq Foundation.

In 2008, the ECJ ruled that the authorities levying such sanctions had to provide a summary to the sanctioned individual of the information that led to the sanctions.  The European Commission complied by providing a summary to al-Qadi and his lawyers.

But ECJ and al-Qadi still weren’t satisfied.  An even higher standard has been promulgated:  the allegations in the summary must be “well founded.”  Surely, the litigants in the case which included the U.K., the European Commission, and the EU’s Council of Ministers, believed the evidence was well-founded enough to impose the sanctions, but not well-founded enough to meet the ever shifting standards of the ECJ.

The law firm of Brick Court Chambers notes that the judgment “is of considerable general significance in relation to the standard of review to be applied in sanctions cases, and the treatment of national security-sensitive material, in the European courts.”

Indeed.  The judgment essentially forces European governments to divulge sensitive intelligence to terrorists to explain why the terrorists are being sanctioned by those governments.

European Voice has a good article explaining the background and the ruling:

Top EU court clears Saudi terror suspect

By Toby Vogel  –  18.07.2013

European Court of Justice rules that the UK and the European Commission failed to provide evidence of Al-Qaeda links.

In a final judgment delivered today, the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg has sided with Yassin Abdullah Kadi, a Saudi national who had fought his blacklisting by the United Nations and the European Union for over a decade.

Kadi was blacklisted by the United Nations Security Council in October 2001, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, over alleged links to al-Qaeda, with the European Union following suit days later. He launched a legal challenge against the freeze of his considerable assets in the EU. In 2008, the ECJ ruled that his rights had been violated because he had not been given the reasons for his blacklisting. The United Kingdom, the European Commission and the EU’s Council of Ministers appealed against that ruling.

Following the 2008 ruling, the Commission provided Kadi with a summary of the reasons for his blacklisting and re-imposed sanctions against him.

The ECJ has now dismissed the appeal by the UK, the Council and the Commission, ruling that “no information or evidence has been produced to substantiate the allegations, roundly refuted by Mr Kadi, of his being involved in activities linked to international terrorism”, according to a summary of the judgment.

The Court also found while the summary the Commission gave to Kadi of the reasons for the sanctions was sufficiently detailed and specific, there was insufficient evidence for his alleged terrorist links.

While the court procedure was underway, and following a decade of litigation in the EU, the US and Switzerland, the UN last year removed Kadi’s name from its sanctions list, following a recommendation from the UN’s ombudsman. Once again, the EU simply implemented the UN’s decision and removed Kadi from its own list as well.

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Campbell: €18m giveaway to teach Resistance

Author and researcher Jacob Campbell

Jacob Campbell, a research fellow at the Institute for Middle Eastern Democracy, has uncovered a European Commission plan to subsidize Lebanese schools despite the announcement by Lebanon’s eduction minister and Hezbollah official that students will be taught “a culture of Resistance.”  Specifically, the European Union has pledged €3.8 million for a Lebanese citizen education program and is contributing €13.7 million toward Lebanon’s “Education Sector Development Plan.”

This assumes that the money won’t be lost forever as it’s channeled through a completely tainted Lebanese financial system prior to its arrival at the indoctrination camps.

Here’s an excerpt from Campbell’s article, “Helping Hezbollah“:

… If Hezbollah is to consolidate its rule over Lebanon, it must command the loyalty of the country’s youth. And, having inherited the previous government’s five-year Education Sector Development Plan (ESDP), Hezbollah is in the ideal position to achieve this by embedding its own ideology into Lebanon’s education system.

Keen to support the strengthening of “students’ national identity and civic responsibilities” in a nation as perennially blighted by sectarian strife as Lebanon is the European Union, which has committed €3.8 million for the development of a citizenship education programme in Lebanese schools. Well-intentioned as this is, it overlooks the fact that Hezbollah’s conception of civic responsibility is fundamentally at odds with the European Union’s. This was most starkly evident in February, when the Lebanese Minister of Education issued a memorandum obligating all public schools to spend an hour imbuing “the culture of Resistance” in children.

Nor has Hezbollah’s attempt to indoctrinate an entire generation stopped there. As part of the ESDP, which the European Union is co-financing with a total budget of €13.7 million, the Lebanese government is seeking to launch a standardised history curriculum. According to the most recent proposal, history lessons will include teaching pupils to appreciate “the Resistance’s importance in terms of defending Lebanon”. The draft syllabus has also been criticised for writing the pro-democracy Cedar Revolution out of Lebanon’s history, as well as omitting Lebanon’s struggle against the Syrian army and Palestinian militias during the civil war. To all impartial observers, it is clear that Hezbollah is exploiting the ESDP to greatly exaggerate its centrality to Lebanese national identity.

When Paul Nuttall MEP submitted a parliamentary question asking whether the European Commission would cancel its financial assistance to the Lebanese Ministry of Education in light of Hezbollah’s efforts to brainwash students, Commissioner Štefan Füle responded by saying that any cessation of funding “would be counterproductive”. Given that the Lebanese Minister of Education announced in May that he has enlisted the help of his Iranian counterpart in implementing the ESDP, the European Commission ought to consider that what is truly counterproductive is sponsoring a project that appears to have been outsourced to Hezbollah’s paymasters in Tehran…

Read the full piece here.

Mr. Campbell also tells Money Jihad that, “As a Eurosceptic, I resent the squandering of taxpayers’ money by an unelected and unaccountable European Commission,” especially if it empowers Hezbollah—an organization committed to terrorism against Israel.

If you live in Europe or America (and especially if you’re a young adult), you too must be wary of a future of being saddled with public debt incurred by profligate politicians elected decades before you could even vote.  The money involved in this Lebanese case may not seem like much in the grand scheme of government waste and abuse.  But how long can your government sustain itself when it engages in, not just expensive welfare programs at home, but continuous foreign aid welfare to an Islamic world that is innately hostile and unappreciative of Europe and the U.S.?

Incidentally, U.S. aid to Lebanon was $73.1 million in 2008, $125.7 in 2009, an estimated $229 million in 2010, and a requested $246.3 million in 2011 according to a Congressional Research Service report.