EU-DIGEST

Dutch say unlocked bike not enticement to steal

The Dutch Supreme Court has rejected the appeal of a bicycle thief who stole a decoy bike planted by police. Lawyers for the convicted thief — a repeat offender who was sentenced to 22 days in jail — had argued that leaving the bike unlocked amounted to entrapment. But the five-judge court has rejected that, saying the man wasn't personally targeted.Tuesday's court ruling said placing an unlocked decoy bike didn't make the suspect do anything he had not intended doing beforehand.

Labels: EU, Judicial System, justice, Netherlands

For the complete report from the Telegraph click on this link

Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, the French first lady, taunted one of the country's most senior women politicians about her failure to seduce President Nicolas Sarkozy, a new book claims.Following a New Year's Eve dinner at the Elysée, Mrs Bruni-Sarkozy and Miss Dati were walking in the palace's private apartments when the then Miss Bruni is said to have pointed at Mr Sarkozy's bed and said: "You'd have loved to occupy it, wouldn't you?" The book says the women "who were just getting to know each other, were also learning how to detest each other". Miss Dati a Muslim and France's Justice Minister was a close friend of Mr Sarkozy's ex-wife, Cécilia Ciganer-Albéniz, who called her "my little sister" - making the new Mrs Bruni-Sarkozy dislike her even more.

Two decades ago Rachida Dati, a French daughter of north African immigrants, got married to a man that she barely knew. It was not quite an arranged marriage. It was a marriage "to please her family". She immediately regretted her decision. She persuaded her Algerian husband to agree to an instant annulment. Rachida Dati was in her early twenties at the time and making her way as a young lawyer and businesswoman in Paris. Through hard work, as a law student and by taking menial jobs, she had already fought her way clear of her impoverished, immigrant family of 11 brothers and sisters just north of Lyons. Two decades later, Mme Dati is France's first senior minister of north African origin. She is a protégée of President Nicolas Sarkozy. She has been catapulted without previous experience – and her enemies insist without any political skills – into one of the most senior and potentially explosive jobs in French government.

Her political career is threatened by her response to a national debate over how much French law should be influenced by its minorities, based on a court decision that reflects Ms. Dati's own experience as a young Muslim woman struggling to make her way out of a ghetto north of the French city of Lyon. The controversy began last week when a Paris newspaper revealed that a court in the northern city of Lille had annulled the marriage of a Muslim couple because the bride, 20, had lied to her husband, 32, about her virginity. The judge did not cite the couple's religion or the bride's previous sexual experience but ruled that, under the French civil code, the young woman had breached the marital contract by being untruthful about what her husband considered "an essential quality decisive for [his] consent." Feminists, philosophers and politicians of all stripes have united to condemn the decision as a step backward for equality and a dangerous step toward incorporating religious beliefs into the laws of a proudly secular state. Note EU-Digest: Lying, if it is about one's virginity or something else, remains a lie, and has nothing to do about one's religion in order for the lie to qualify as a lie. Mme Dati is on the right track. President Sarkozy said calls for justice minister Rachida Dati to resign over comments she made about a Muslim marriage annulment amounted to a ‘baseless lynching’.

Labels: Cécilia Sarkozy, EU, France, justice, Rachida Dati, Religion

German Justice Failures: Paving the Way for a Muslim Parallel Society (in Europe)

A recent ruling in Germany by a judge who cited the Koran underscores the dilemma the country faces in reconciling Western values with a growing immigrant population. A disturbing number of rulings are helping to create a parallel Muslim world in Germany that is welcoming to Islamic fundamentalists.

Die Tageszeitung ran a story on the case titled: "In the Name of the People: Beating Allowed," while the right-wing tabloid Bild called it "An Outrageous Case!" The same unanimity across party lines prevailed in the political realm. "Unbearable," was conservative Bavarian Interior Minister Günther Beckstein's ruling, while Lale Akgün, a member of parliament of Turkish origin and the Social Democratic Party's representative on Islamic issues, commented that the Frankfurt judge's ruling was "worse than some backyard decision by an Islamist imam." Even the deputy head of the Green Party's parliamentary group, Hans-Christian Ströbele, noted that a German judge is obligated to uphold German law.

The following is the relevant part from Sura 4 on Women, taken from the Holy Koran as translated by Tashad Kadifa: “The men are made responsible for the women, and God has endowed them with certain qualities, and made them the bread earners. The righteous women will cheerfully accept this arrangement, since it is God’s commandment, and honour their husbands during their absence. If you experience rebellion from the women, you shall first talk to them, then (you may use negative incentives like) deserting them in bed, then you may (as a last alternative) beat them. If they obey you, you are not permitted to transgress against them. God is Most High, Supreme.” (http://www.submission.ws/quran/frames/index.html)

Note EU-Digest: "The real dilemma is that some European judges do not seem to be aware that the EU is a democratic and secular society. Muslim women who have become European Citizens have a free choice to accept Muslim religious laws or not, but it is against the law in Europe to beat any living being."

Labels: EU, Integration, Islam, justice

Europe at 50 - Join The Debate - what story should Europe tell

Welcome. Join us in a debate about where Europe has come from and where it should be heading to. As the European Union approaches its ‘50th birthday’ — the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Rome — it seems to many of us that Europe has lost the plot. Europeans badly need a new story that we can tell in our different languages and idioms.

Timothy Garton Ash professor of European studies at Oxford University drafted a first proposal for a new way in which we could tell our story around six goals to which most Europeans aspire: Freedom, Peace, Law, Prosperity, Diversity and Solidarity.

You can read the English version in Prospect magazine by clicking on this link

Versions published in other European languages will be posted as soon as they appear.

This is only one writer’s first draft. The story is no good unless enough Europeans think it is pointing in the right direction. Please join in the debate. Feel free to use any European language you like. The discussion is completely free, but it will be followed by a group of our European students here at Oxford. We will remove anything that is downright obscene or constitutes incitement to hatred, and may tidy up the formatting, but otherwise we will leave posts exactly as they come.

Labels: Democracy, European Integration, European Unity, justice, prosperity