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

Greetings

Ukraine was not on our agenda this week, but the MEPs who observed the presidential elections there believe them to have been free and fair and hope that prime minister Julia Timoshenko, the losing candidate, will accept the result and step down. Many Liberals would prefer the victors of the orange revolution to have been returned to power, but we must accept the verdict of the electorate.

Greece was on our agenda and – more importantly – on the agenda of the heads of state and government at yesterday’s European Council meeting who may decide to provide guarantees against the country defaulting on its debt. The President of the European Central Bank was also there. The only positive aspects of the current situation are that Greece has a Prime Minister determined to sort out the mess and that the other euro-zone countries are capable of bailing it out if they have to.

The most controversial item on Parliament’s agenda was the draft agreement with the USA to continue providing their government with information about people’s bank transfers for use in their Terrorist Finance Tracking Program. Some concessions have been made, but the new ‘temporary’ arrangements proposed to us still breach data protection laws. I’ve written a lot about this in recent weeks, so I’ll not harp on about it: suffice to say that despite huge pressure from the US government and our own governments we rejected the proposed agreement. And we were right so to do. If the US administration had asked Congress illegally to override Americans’ civil liberties to suit the EU, Congresswomen and -men would have done exactly the same. And our vote does not represent ‘a serious threat to the security of European citizens’, as one Commissioner alleged.

Parliament also voted to recommend a ban on the trawling for and trade in bluefin tuna; and in favour of greater exchange of information between EU governments to fight tax fraud and tax evasion.

The Lisbon Treaty provided for a right of citizens’ initiative, under which one million citizens can petition the EU institutions. Well, the first such petition has been launched, by a Danish charity. It is called ‘Keep your promises to the poor!’ and points out that while the EU has pledged to give 0.56% of GNI in development aid it gave only 0.4% in 2008. It is available for signature at http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/promises.

Parliament is not sitting next week, so I’ll write again on 26 February.

Regards

Graham