Left wing parties suggest restricting awards of Danish orders to foreign heads of state

Following Queen Margrethe II of Denmark’s official visit to Bahrain recently there has been mounting criticism of the fact that King Hamad was awarded the Grand Cross of the Order of Dannebrog. The Socialist People’s Party suggested already during the Egyptian revolution that Queen Margrethe should strip Hosni Mubarak of his Order of the Elephant (as happened to Nicolae Ceausescu at the time of his downfall in 1989), but this idea was rejected by Prime Minister Løkke Rasmussen of the Liberal Party.
Awarding the Grand Cross of Dannebrog to another dicator shortly afterwards did of course not look very pretty. It looked even worse when protests erupted in Bahrain a few days later and the army began shooting and killing protesters.
The main opposition parties - the Social Democrats, the Socialist People’s Party and the Social Liberal Party - demanded that Foreign Minister Lene Espersen (of the Conservative Party) should explain to Parliament the reasoning behind the decision to grant the Grand Cross to the King of Bahrain.
Today the news agency Ritzau reports that the smallest of the opposition parties, the Red-Green Alliance, has proposed that Danish orders should in the future only be awarded to heads of state of countries which are “democratic and respect fundamental human rights” and that Parliament’s committee on foreign relations should be consulted before orders are awarded to foreign heads of state. The Socialist People’s Party has announced that they will support the motion, while the Social Liberal Party calls it “an interesting idea”.
However, Michael Aastrup Jensen, the foreign policy spokesman of the Liberal Party, replies that orders are nothing but “a piece of metal” and “are an old tradition and something one exchanges like presents during state visits”. As the far-right wing Danish People’s Party, which holds the balance in Parliament, has a rather - let’s say flexible - approach to human right issues and only very recently spoke supportingly of Hosni Mubarak it thus seems likely that this motion will pass during the current political situation. Another outcome might of course be possible after this year’s general election, which it seems likely that the current government will lose.
What Michael Aastrup Jensen is right about is of course that it is a tradition to award high orders to foreign heads of state during state and official visits. If one in each case should consider if the visitor/host is worthy of a Danish order one would naturally risk insulting those who are not given any orders. Having a general rule such as the Red-Green Alliance suggest seems a better and more practical solution.
Among earlier despots who have received the Order of the Elephant are Nicolae Ceausescu, Josip Broz Tito and the Shah of Iran, while the Grand Cross of the Order of Dannebrog has also been awarded to Herman Göring and Elena Ceausescu.

A different Nobel Prize ceremony this year

Friday is the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel and as always the Nobel Prizes will be presented. The Nobel Peace Prize ceremony will as always take place in Oslo’s City Hall, but this year the ceremony will be very different from earlier years in that no prize will actually be given out as there is no-one to receive it.
The laureate for 2010, the Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, was sentenced to eleven years in prison last year, while his wife was put under house arrest as soon as the award was announced on 8 October. His brothers have also been refused permission to leave China so that they cannot travel to Oslo to accept the Prize on his behalf. Thus an empty chair will appear on the podium in the City Hall.
The situation that no-one is there to represent the laureate is a new one. Aung San Suu Kyi’s two sons accepted the Prize on behalf of their mother in 1991, while Danuta Walesa came to Oslo to receive her husband’s prize in 1983. Mikhail Gorbachev was represented by his Vice President in 1990, but since then the Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that only family members can act as proxies.
This thwarts the idea put forward by Lech Walesa, who suggested that he and other previous Nobel Peace Prize laureates should go to Oslo and accept the Prize collectively on Liu Xiaobo’s behalf. That would indeed have sent a powerful message of international solidarity.
The award of the Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo is in many ways reminiscent of the Nobel Peace Prize for 1935, which a year late in 1936 was awarded to the German dissident and anti-Nazi Carl von Ossietzky, whose paper had revealed Germany’s illegal rearmament. This obviously caused Hitler to go into one of his rages, forbidding Germans to accept any Nobel Prize in the future. The turmoil of 1936 led to the decision that members of the Norwegian government should not sit on the Nobel Committee so that its decision would not appear to be influenced by Norwegian authorities. That year the royal family also stayed away from the Peace Prize ceremony in order not to give further offence to Hitler – hardly the most glorious episode in the history of the Norwegian monarchy.
The Chinese dictatorship, which has not yet picked up on the fact that the Norwegian Nobel Committee does not represent the Norwegian authorities, has been busy threatening Norway with reprisals for awarding the Peace Prize to Liu. Despite these threats the King and Queen will attend the ceremony and the following banquet as usual and the King will also attend the concert the following evening (normally the concert is attended by the Crown Prince and/or the Crown Princess, but they are still away on their long foreign journey).
Unusually, the USA will be represented not only by its ambassador, but also by its third highest-ranking official, outgoing Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi. The Chinese have also issued threats to those countries which are represented at the Nobel ceremony, but this has met with limited success. Of the 65 countries which have embassies in Oslo nineteen have declined their invitations. In addition to China the list of absentees consists of Serbia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Colombia, Tunisia, Kazakhstan, Morocco, Pakistan, Russia, Ukraine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, Cuba, Venezuela, Sudan, Saudi Arabia and Iran – hardly a roll-call of the great champions of democracy and human rights.

Flashback to the 1930s

A few days ago a substantial majority of the Swiss people, against the wishes of their government and parliament, voted to forbid the building of minarets. This attack on the freedom of belief has naturally been endorsed by far-right wing parties across Europe. Here in Norway MP Per-Willy Amundsen (Progress Party) has said he finds the Swiss decision “interesting” and in VG yesterday there was a letter to the editor signed “Per, Bergen”, which read in full: “Now there must be a referendum on mosques also in our dear Norway”. Try substituting the word “mosques” with “synagogues” and it becomes obvious why this sounds eeriely familiar.

New books: The Bush heritage

Somewhat to my own surprise I have recently found myself reading several books and articles on George W. Bush and his presidency. With Bush back home in Texas and Dick Cheney, now powerless, busy ranting about how the current US government is opposed to the use of torture and is leading the country into the abyss, the Bush regime is now distant enough to feel more like history than an ever-present danger.
Earlier this summer I read Robert Draper’s Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush, which was interesting but already out of date. Written in 2007, it does not cover the financial crisis which was the last nail in the Bush presidency’s coffin, nor the extent of that administration’s crimes against humanity which have been revealed during the last year.
The latter issue, although he does not just exactly that expression, is however thoroughly dealt with in a new Danish book, Arven efter Bush – Præsidentembedet og krigen mod terror by the jurist Anders Henriksen, published by Gyldendal. Henriksen demonstrates how people around Bush wanted to increase the President’s power and resurrect the “imperial presidency” which disappeared with Richard Nixon after Watergate.
Key figures in the book are Dick Cheney, John Yoo, who worked at the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel in 2001-2003 and David Addington, who was legal advisor and later chief of staff to Dick Cheney and sometimes known as “Cheney’s Cheney”. At the heart of the story is the so-called Unitary Executive Theory, coupled with the belief expressed by Nixon to David Frost that things are not illegal if they are done by the President.
The Unitary Executive Theory was first formulated by legal advisors to the Reagan administration in 1986. The theory argues that the usual interpretation of the US Constitution’s words on the separation of power is wrong and that the original intention was that certain powers were exclusively reserved for the President and others exclusively referred for Congress. It follows from this that the President has no right to interfere with those areas reserved for Congress and that Congress will have to stay out of those things left to the President, among them the power to shape the USA’s foreign and security policy.
Henriksen shows, in a detached and balanced manner of writing, how the Bush administration used this theory in many creative ways to stretch the President’s authority, to ignore Congress, to reinterpret laws and conventions to suit their needs and how they by this sort of manipulation were able to justify (at least to themselves) their right to hold prisoners without giving them access to the judicial system, to treat prisoners in a way which we now know amounted to torture, etc.
The Unitary Executive Theory, which has very few supporters among constitutional experts, was in the end soundly rejected by the Supreme Court and Henriksen argues that its supporters achieved the exact opposite of what they wanted – rather than strengthening the office of the President, they left a weakened presidency which will be watched closer than before by Congress and the Supreme Court to make sure that this abuse of power does not happen again.
Meanwhile it has emerged that Dick Cheney in discussing his upcoming memoirs has expressed the view that President Bush become too soft on the “War on Terror” and too concilatory towards public opinion during his second term in office and showed an unexpected independence in not always following Cheney’s advice. As someone commented on Swedish radio last week, one wonders what Cheney’s references are if he finds Bush too soft. The schism between the former President and former Vice-President was also highlighted by Time recently in an article about Bush’s refusal to pardon Cheney’s former Chief of Staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, for his role in leaking a CIA agent’s name to the press in retaliation for her husband’s criticism of the Bush administration.

Some information on Henriksen’s book from the publisher’s website:
http://www.g.dk/bog/arven-efter-bush-anders-henriksen_9788702076936#

Time’s report on the final days of Bush and Cheney:
http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1912297,00.html

Washington Post reporting on Cheney’s disappointment in Bush:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/12/AR2009081203306.html?hpid=topnews

Bush aides to be brought to justice?

Recently CIA documents released on the orders of President Barack Obama confirmed the widespread use of torture on prisoners of the Bush administration's so-called "war on terror". The files showed that some prisoners had been tortured up to nearly 200 times with the approval of George W. Bush's administration.
Banning the use of such interrogation methods was one of the very first acts of Barack Obama when assuming office in January, but his announcement a few days ago that CIA agents who had carried out the torture on orders from the Bush administration would not be prosecuted came as a disappointment to many human rights activists. This is in contradiction of the Nuremberg principles which say that each individual is responsible for his or her actions and cannot claim innocence by insisting that one just carried out orders.
During a White House press meeting with King Abdullah II of Jordan yesterday, President Obama did however indicate that those persons in the Bush administration which authorised the use of torture, which includes former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, may risk being put on trial.
The perhaps most evil member of the Bush administration, former Vice President Dick Cheney, reacted to the President's remarks by shamelessly calling for the CIA to release documents which he claims show that torture works!
The use of torture is a grave crime against humanity. If the USA ever again shall be able to talk human rights with other nations they must prosecute those of their own citizens who carried out the torture and those who sanctioned it. Cheney should be prominent among those put on trial.
President Truman had a sign on his desk which read "The buck stops here". They are perhaps less willing to admit it, but ultimate responsibility for the crimes committed by the Bush administration rests with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.
An article in The Washington Post on President Obama's remarks:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/21/AR2009042101692.html?hpid%3Dtopnews&sub=AR