Taking Organs from executed prisoners in China. A change coming?

In Strasbourg on 22nd April, I listened to a lunchtime talk given by the World Medicine Association. The WMA, founded in 1947 and based in Geneva, represents all the doctors of the world and concentrates on “medical ethics”. 

China was a founder member of the WMA in 1947 but soon left when its own internal health service was abolished. They reapplied in 1997. 

Amnesty International has often reported and China confirmed in 2006, that China is taking organs from executed prisoners. Previously whenever China was asked to comment on this, they replied that they first wanted to talk about Taiwan’s membership. They justified taking organs from dead prisoners by insisting that capital punishment is essential in China and that removing a victim’s organs “is their last atonement.” National European governments have been very weak in discussing this problem with China, as they are with every “difficult” subject which might put at risk their lucrative business contracts with China. But the European Parliament has been strong - over Tibet and over other human rights issues and must remain so.

Now, significantly, the Chinese attitude appears to be changing, and not just because of the Olympic Games in Beijing later this summer. China needs the outside world - to publicise its achievements, because it wants to be recognised as the best at transplanting organs, and because there is money to be made from rich outsiders flying to China to receive transplants. 

China has no medical health service for its citizens except along its east coast. It has a hepatitis epidemic - to which transplants are not the solution but needs a large-scale protection programme.

 

MEPs’ assistants

There has, rightly, been an outcry against the confidential auditors’ report about dubious assistants employed by some MEPs. 

Being a member of the parliament’s Budgetary Control committee, I read the full report - in a sealed room and had to sign that I would not reveal its contents nor take any notes. The report by a team of auditors said that they had looked at a sample of the contracts between some MEPs and the assistants whom they employed. No names, no political parties, no nationalities were identified. It was clear to me that some - but not all - un-named MEPs have stretched the rules beyond breaking-point.  The problem, in my opinion, is that the parliament’s staff is grossly overstretched : they have to try to verify contracts in any of three alphabets (ours, Greek, or Bulgarian cyrillic) and in any of the 23 official EU languages, and there are not enough of them to do the job effectively.

When the full committee met, the Liberal MEPs moved that the report be made public. The committee chairman, an Austrian socialist, insisted that a vote was not on the agenda so it would have to be part of Any Other Business just before the meeting’s end on the following afternoon. When we reached that moment, a lawyer was given the floor and he argued why a vote was not possible (not least because the report did not belong to the committee and was therefore not ours to publish). The clock ticked rapidly towards 18.30 when the language interpreters are entitled to go home. As the wrangling continued, suddenly the committee room filled with arriving Christian-Democrat and Socialist MEPs to fill the empty places. At 18.29 the vote was called - and we Liberals lost it.

I love the work of the parliament, but at that moment I felt ashamed at the blatant cover-up by the Conservatives’ allies and by Labour’s allies.

 

Airport security

My Spanish Liberal MEP colleague, Ignasi Guardens, has started a potentially major court case. You may not know that the stringent new regulations for airport security, brought in last year all over Europe, which include the ban on carrying liquids, are an EU law. But it was not passed properly in the opinion of MEPs.

 The correct EU law-making procedure is that the two chambers, the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament, must agree. In this case, the ministers refused to give us all the details, claiming high security. They announced it as if it were a law. But MEPs believe it is not because we have never been given access to all its details.

 Ignasi, at a Spanish airport, challenged the right of an official to order him to remove his shoes before passing through the security arch. The “law” says that the officials are only entitled to demand shoes be removed if an alarm has sounded, not before. Ignasi, a valiant defender of basic rights, removed his shoes but is taking a case against the airport officials to the Spanish courts, and hopes that the Spanish constitutional court will rule that the EU law is unconstitutional because it was “passed” in secret. The case will then make its way to Europe’s supreme court, the Court of Justice in Luxembourg.

 The “law” is an EU regulation - which means it has to be the same in all 27 EU member states, with no right for any state to add to it or subtract from it. But, of course if you argue, airport officials can make you miss your flight!

There is an interesting and important balance involved here: national security against the right of the citizen to have laws passed correctly.

 

Our region is the most obese - in the whole of Europe !

Attended the regular quarterly of the East Midlands Regional Assembly at Melton Mowbray. Am horrified to hear the report by Regional Health Authority - who tell us that our region is the most obese not just in the whole of the UK but the most obese region in the whole of Europe!

When I get my five minutes to speak to the assembled councillors, I ask them to start giving me opinions or lobbying advice about forthcoming EU laws which are under consideration in the parliament. But I receive the usual Westminster-type “ya-boo” response. A Labour councillor making the asinine comment that “you should sort yourself out”, and a Tory councillor saying that he found Helmer satisfactory (even though Helmer has been expelled from his political group in the European Parliament), and then proving to me that he did not know about the EU Postal Directive (which liberalises distribution of letters from 2001 within the EU but has nothing to do with the UK Labour government closing rural post offices which the Tory insisted it did).

I sometimes despair at the inward-looking confrontational attitudes of Westminster which the Tory and Labour councillors copy. We all now live in a globalising world, and need to work together to match the growing might of China and India, rather than continue shouting “ya-boo” at each other in the goldfish bowl that Britain is in danger of becoming.

 

How to Reduce Aircraft Emissions at a stroke

At a briefing for MEPs given by EASA (the European Air safety Agency) we are told that they “can reduce aircraft emissions by 12% at a stroke”. Challenged to explain how, the answer is to create a single European air space”.

At present, aircraft weave their way across Europe and are subject to instructions from each country’s air traffic controllers. The result is a zig-zag flight-path across European skies. If there were a single set of traffic controllers - as there is for the USA - aircraft could come in to land on a straight line and thus save lots of fuel. Why doesn’t this happen? Because each national government in Europe wants to keep control in its own little hands, rather than seeing the bigger beneficial picture.

 

Hoping to defeat Climate Change with Technology, and ever-faster computers

Lunch with one of the men who will take over when Bill Gates retires from Microsoft in June. Asked about Climate Change, he says the world’s only hope is a technology breakthrough and the problem which worries him out is whether the breakthrough will be allowed to get to market. The breakthrough, he says, is unlikely to come from a big corporation but from some smaller outsider.

There is plenty of energy around us, but hydrogen will not be the big source. We need a better electricity buffering mechanism. The future may lie with lots of individual energy generators, most probably solar powered, and linked together by a grid.

The biggest change in micro processors of the last 30 years will come in the next five years because computer manufacturers have reached a physical heat emission limitation with current microchips. Over the next ten years the speed of computers will increase fifty fold, voice recognition may become perfect, equipment will be integrated so there will be no separate telephones for example. One can foresee that simultaneous interpretation will be done by high-speed computers and they may perhaps replace human interpreters.

 

Who buys Viagra and why?

At a briefing for MEPs by Pfizer, the world’s largest pharmaceutical company, we hear about the fake medicines which are starting to find their way into chemist shops and appear to be in genuine packaging.

The speaker also said that Pfizer also wondered who buys Viagra on the internet when it is highly likely to be useless or even dangerous? Pfizer did the research to find the answer. They discovered that Viagra is bought on the internet mainly by middle-aged men in suits: these men say they buy it that way “because there is no time to go to the doctor” and they gamble that the pills will be genuine. In sad contrast, men in Africa buy Viagra on the internet because it is cheap and they also gamble that it will be genuine.

So, either way, the organised criminal gangs who are behind the internet advertisements, make money with fake pills made in China.

 

Welcome…

Welcome to my Blog.

It’s purpose is to provide you with occasional valuable snippets of information which I come across in my role as the MEP for the East Midlands. It does not try to be a diary of every event.

I hope you find some of it useful.

You are most welcome to comment about it.

You can also contact me by email. My email address is bill.newtondunn@europarl.europa.eu
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Best wishes, Bill