Commission suffers an identity crisis

Date: 05/11/1998

Geoff Meade takes a light-hearted look at life in the European Union THE Commission is dead, long live the Commission!

As you may be aware, from this week the European Commission no longer exists. It has been abandoned in the interests of bureaucratic efficiency and time-saving. Something had to go, said sad officials, and it was the Commission. Rest In Peace.

Nice idea - and it's true. The European Commission is an ex-European Commission. Not this European Commission in Brussels, of course, but that European Commission in Strasbourg. The one everyone always confuses with this one.

The European Commission of Human Rights, to be exact, has been despatched to the history books after 40 years of front-line service filtering thousands of human rights complaints.

From this week we have a new, streamlined human rights process involving one full-time court in Strasbourg which replaces the old two-tier part-time system of a human rights commission and a human rights court.

In the good old days, which ended last Friday, the European Commission of Human Rights met occasionally and thought about cases for an awfully long time.

At the end of that awfully long time, it decided whether or not to pass those cases to the European Court of Human Rights, which took another awfully long time to think about them before passing judgement.

Two awfully long times added together equals five or six years on average, these days, for a human rights case to be completed - and that is totally unacceptable, according to the Council of Europe's deputy secretary-general Hans Christian Kruger.

In fact, when you allow for the years spent by a human rights complainant exhausting domestic legal remedies before turning to Strasbourg, the whole thing can take a decade or more, during which time people have died or lost interest, or both.

Even in its infancy, proceedings took a reasonably long time. The European Commission of Human Rights, under its eminent British first president Sir Humphrey Wadlock, was set up in July 1954, when the other European Commission was still little more than a twinkle in someone's eye.

The Strasbourg European Commission declared its first case admissible in June 1958. The first judgement of the human rights court followed in July 1961.

From those small and long-drawn out beginnings, 1,000 human rights verdicts have flowed - an average of one a fortnight or thereabouts - over 40 years.

But somewhere along the way, the whole thing became muddled up with the European Union. Back then, Brussels and Strasbourg were so far apart that one could be forgiven for not noticing the similarity in the names of its new post-war peace-cementing institutions. (A messenger, on horseback, out of breath: “Sire, sire, ten thousand pardons for interrupting the inauguration ceremony of this noble Commission as ordained by the Treaty of Rome, but I bring word that there exists already another ... Commission!”

Gasps of horror, mutterings of “But how ... why ... where ...?”

“Sire, this other Commission resides far far away in another land that is called Strasbourg.” Sighs of relief, mutterings of “Oh, well that's all right then.”)

But the world grew ever smaller and as word spread of the two Commissions, confusion took hold until this Commission - the one in the Breydel in Brussels - now finds itself having to explain on a regular basis why it has not declared a human rights case either admissible or inadmissible at the European Court of Justice in Strasbourg.

All that will change, thankfully, now that the other European Commission no longer exists. And the whole human rights judicial procedure could be cut down to less than three years, says Herr Kruger.

This may still sound like a long time, but it is only, roughly, the duration of one world-wide beef ban as declared admissible, not to say compulsory, by one or other of the two Commissions in the recent past.

So a happy by-product of this streamlined human rights process in Strasbourg is that the confusion between the building blocks of the various Europes is banished. Judicial expediency has spawned institutional clarity.

Or perhaps not. Because some bright spark in the Council of Europe has decided that, while dispensing with the confusingly-named European Commission, the Council of Europe shall add to its lustrous bodies and personages an official whose name shall be ... Commissioner.

The title of Commissioner for Human Rights shall go to an as yet unchosen being whose task will be to act as a human rights promoter on behalf of the 40 Council of Europe member states. The job of this European Commissioner-without-Commission shall be “to promote education in and awareness of human rights in the member states” and “contribute to the promotion of the effective observance and full enjoyment of human rights in the member states”.

He or she will be appointed next May and before he or she does any of the above, the first thing he or she should do is appoint a spokesperson at the European Commission in Brussels, because that is where all the phone calls will be arriving.

You can just imagine it: “I'm sorry. There's no Commissioner of that name here. Yes, we do have lots of Commissioners, but we don't have one for human rights. Well yes, perhaps we should, but we don't. I can offer you Commissioners for everything from food additives to famine, but there's nothing here under human rights. I suggest you call Strasbourg and see if they can help.”

Herr Kruger announced the creation of the new Commissioner with an apologetic air. Aware of the potential public relations pitfalls of this peculiar decision, he said:

“If you ask me why we are calling this new person a Commissioner, I have to say I don't know. Maybe we will change the name.”

But they won't of course. What would it be changed too? Ombudsman? The other Europe already has one of those, too.

Perhaps it is something for the Committee of Ministers to consider - the Committee of Ministers in Strasbourg, not the Council of Ministers in Brussels which, of course, remains nothing to do with the Council of Europe.

No, we must accept that there shall forever be institutional confusion and we must just learn to live with it.

The Commission is dead! Long live the Commissioner!