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EU Whistleblower Cleared
Remember Hans-Martin Tillack? He was the German journalist who investigated corruption in the EU, only to be rewarded with an EU-ordered visit from Belgian cops, who confiscated his laptop, searched his home and held him for ten hours without access to lawyers. His notebooks were seized, and police demanded to know who his sources were. Five years of work uncovering EU corruption was confiscated by the people he was investigating.
Tillack says the police, who were acting on orders from the EU's anti-fraud office, told him "I was lucky I wasn't in Burma or central Africa, where journalists get the real treatment."
This week, the former Stern correspondent was cleared of wrongdoing following a three year court battle.
Dan Hannan reports that MEPs jeered Tillack at a press conference he held after his release for "giving ammunition to anti-Europeans."
"Before he arrived, the German press corps in Brussels was largely made up of missionaries, not journalists. Copy was routinely submitted in advance to Commission officials for approval; negative stories were suppressed; any criticism of the EU, even on narrow grounds of financial probity, was dismissed as tasteless, populist and possibly Nazi-inspired.
"Tillack thought of himself as a pro-European, but could see that such deference was doing the EU no favours. In the absence of critical scrutiny, its bureaucracy had become self-serving, bloated and corrupt. Tillack began to expose some of the more egregious corruption cases, such as the story of how several EU officials had taken advantage of the poor accounting system to divert millions of euros into private accounts.
"The Euro-elites were furious. They expected such “anti-Europeanism” from British red-tops, but not from goody-goody Germans."
Now, he has won damages from the European Court of Human Rights.
Back in 2004, when Tillack's home was raided, a British journalist grumbled to Hannan, "‘If they can do this to a German Europhile and get away with it, people like me might as well pack up and go home."
And go home they did: No British newspaper has a full-time Brussels bureau - a few years ago, every broadsheet boasted one. This is nothing less than a dereliction of duty on behalf of the British press, whose supposed iconoclastic bravery is absent in Brussels. One doesn't demand ranting Eurosceptics on the pages of every newspaper, but a couple of people who could ask serious questions of the EU authorities would be nice.
Those journalists in Brussels can largely be described as tame. First, they're kept in check by the fear of accusations of racism: We quoted Lord Kinnock, who as Deputy Leader of the European Commission back then claimed that anyone suspicious of EU motives was a bigot and a racist.
Then there's the fact that some journalists have a nice little earner or two on the go thanks to EU largesse: Many Brussels correspondents are actually in the pay of the EU, "advising" on media relations boards, editing official newsletters and so long. They have become part of the system they were sent to investigate - and the chances of them challenging that are minimal. In return, certain EU commissioners demand little favours, such as copy approval on stories.
At the time, we wrote, "Like Hollywood celebrities who advertise cat litter in Japan in the knowledge that such foreign entanglements will not damage their image in the US, Brussels-based journalists spin the official EU story to readers at home while pocketing the same readers' tax Euros to "consult" the commission on dealing with the media."
The EU even set up its own news agencies to ensure it gets a good press. News channel Euronews gets funding from the European Commission. Hannan asked then Commission President Romano what he got for his money:
"(Prodi's) reply was beyond parody. Yes, he said, he did give it grants, but such grants ‘in no way restrict the editorial freedom of the beneficiary, who must, however, respect the image of the European institutions and the raison d’être and general objectives of the Union’."
