FEBRUARY-MARCH 2008

Defending the principle of press freedom
EU OBSERVER  Monday 4.2.08
[Comment] By Hans-Martin Tillack           (Former "Stern"  Magazine's Brussels correspondent)


EUOBSERVER / COMMENT - It is now almost four years - March 2004 - since six Belgian policemen first came to my workplace and my then Brussels apartment. They presented a search warrant and then took away nearly all of my archives. Until today the police still keep some 1000 pages in their possession.
But last week (30 January) the Belgian police came in peace. They wanted to return my documents to me, police commissioner Philippe Charlier told my colleagues in the Brussels office of the Stern magazine.
Of course, this was very good news. The Belgian authorities were now acquiescing in the face of a European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) judgement from last November.
Seven judges had ruled that the search and seizure of my documents had been a violation of freedom of expression. The judges noted that the search had been triggered by the EU Anti-fraud Office (OLAF).
These EU anti-fraud officials had based their complaint on nothing more than "rumours" of alleged bribery and with the clear aim of identifying my sources inside the OLAF, the Court recognised.
So now the Belgians are learning their lesson.
Already in 2005, the kingdom's parliament introduced a new law which guarantees the protection of sources, and to a much larger degree than similar laws in, for example, Germany, my own home country.
But there remain others who stubbornly refuse to learn from the Strasbourg judgement. This is not only true for OLAF and the EU Commission, who after the ECHR ruling both went to great lengths to explain that the whole case really did not concern them at all.
The refusal to draw lessons also applies to another EU body that normally vigorously defends the principle of press freedom - the European Parliament, which only recently named its press room after the murdered Russian reporter, Anna Politkovskaya.
Washing hands of the episode
The parliament does not seem to show the same affection for journalists who are very much alive, however - especially when they cover the EU institutions.
Although the members of this parliament are elected to hold the EU Commission and indeed OLAF to account, a great majority of MEPs has always defended the EU anti-fraud office boss, Franz-Hermann Brüner.
German social democrat MEP Helmut Kuhne did get really angry about this "scandal", immediately following the raid in April 2004. But when referring to a scandal, Kuhne did not mean OLAF's dubious dealings, but rather the fact that a few minority MEPs had asked embarrassing questions about it in a meeting of the budgetary control committee!
Then, the OLAF investigator, Peter Baader, washed his hands of the episode. He assured the committee that the anti fraud-office had never even mentioned the word "search" when transmitting their complaints against me to the judicial authorities.
However, some time later it became public that OLAF had even proposed in writing that "parallel searches" be conducted in my office and the Stern magazine headquarters in Hamburg. The parliament had been openly misled and yet almost nobody in the assembly complained.
The one person who did complain was the EU ombudsman, Nikiforos Diamandouros. In May 2005, he submitted a special report to the European Parliament in which he concluded that OLAF had made incorrect and misleading statements to him in their submissions concerning my case.
Mr Diamandouros also suggested that the parliament might take up his complaint by way of a parliamentary report.
Indeed, how can citizens trust him as their advocate, if powerful EU officials were allowed to manipulate the inquiry with false statements?
Normally the petitions committee never hesitates to support the ombudsman. But in this case, the committee ran into fierce opposition from the Conference of Presidents (CoP), where the chairmen of the political groups get together to decide on what is important business.
Hot potato
Since summer 2005, the CoP has treated the ombudsman's report like a hot potato. Although constantly changing its arguments, the conference has maintained always the same line: The ombudsman's report shall not be discussed.
This line was defended by the Christian Democrat and now parliament president, Hans-Gert Poettering by Socialist chief Martin Schulz and by the head of the liberals, Graham Watson. On 15 November 2007, the CoP once again rules against the wish of the petitions committee that the ombudsman's report be taken up.
But if the ombudsman had such a bad case, why not discuss this in the parliament?
Mr Poettering and his allies apparently feared that the case against OLAF was too strong. But why are the parliament's leaders so anxious not to upset the OLAF boss?
Only last week, a majority in the budgetary committee voted down an amendment by Austrian social democrat Herbert Bösch that reminded OLAF of its responsibility for the raid on the Stern office. The committee claimed that the OLAF investigation had not been the "subject of the ruling".
These people must not have read the court's decision.
One thing is true: Over the course of my years in Brussels, I have published quite a number of articles that were not very much liked in the EU parliament. But if Mssrs Pöttering, Schulz and Watson only feel like defending journalists' rights when these reporters heap praise on them - then they have perhaps a bit more in common with Russia's Vladimir Putin than they might wish.
And rather less with a democratic little country like Belgium. ---------------------------------------------------- Hans-Martin Tillack is a reporter in the Berlin office of the German magazine Stern. From 1999 to 2004 he was the magazine's Brussels correspondent