Please find below the latest newsletter from Graham Watson, our Liberal Democrat Member of the European Parliament for South West England and Gibraltar:

Greetings

Relations with the US were on the agenda in Brussels this week. Hilary Clinton is upset that the European Parliament’s justice and home affairs committee voted yesterday to reject the latest proposal for a regime governing bank account data transfer to the US (to help them fight crime). The matter will have to come to the floor of the House before a final decision can be reached, but I think we will follow the committee‘s advice. And Barack Obama has upset the EU by letting it be known he will not attend the six-monthly EU-US summit planned for this Spring. He is too busy with other business.

My week started in Brussels. I found myself again defending the European Arrest Warrant as the case of England football supporter Garry Mann went to the European Court of Human Rights. (If you listened to Radio 4 or 5-live or watched news channel on Tuesday morning you may have heard me.) Mann was convicted of attacking police after a football match in Portugal in 2005 and encouraging others to do the same. Unsurprisingly, Portugal wants him to serve his sentence. Is Mann the victim of an injustice? As Lord Justice Moses said, if there is a problem it is that he had poor legal representation.

But most of my week has been spent in Cyprus with the European Parliament’s ‘contact group’ for relations with northern Cyprus. We met political leaders on both sides of the green line. They are making progress towards an agreement to unify the island, but it is slow and may be too slow to prevent the election in April of a more nationalist community leader as ’President’ of northern Cyprus. Both sides want return of land which they were forced off in – or just before – the 1974 Turkish invasion and which, in many cases, has since been developed by others. The irony is that if they agreed to settle for something less they would all become hugely better off: the estimated benefit of the ‘peace dividend’ is a EUR 1.8 bn boost to the island’s economy, lifting the average income of Greek Cypriots by 25% and of Turkish Cypriots by 40% over five years.

Greece and Turkey are also occupying minds in Brussels. Next week we vote to adopt (I predict) a report on Turkey’s progress towards EU accession which will be more critical of Turkey than before, particularly on issues regarding Cyprus. And we note the monitoring arrangements put in place to ensure that Greece deals with its budget deficit, which is four times higher than the Euro zone rules allow. At 12.7% it is lower than the UK’s deficit, but Greece’s public debt is equivalent to 112% of GDP, while the UK’s is still under 70%.

Much of my effort this week has gone into an oration I have been asked to give about Chris Clarke at his memorial service at Wells Cathedral this afternoon. He was truly an inspiring leader and, to me, a trusted friend. I hope I can do him justice.

Regards

Graham