(The Conversation) – The European commission is taking legal action against Hungary at the European court of justice (ECJ), escalating a longstanding dispute over the country’s anti-LGBT laws. This is an unprecedented step for the EU, but it isn’t a sure win for LGBT rights in Europe – and even has the potential to endanger them.

Hungary (under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s leadership) and the EU have been at odds for years over the wider issue of the rule of law. This intensified in 2021 when Hungary adopted a new law banning the depiction or promotion of LGBT-related material to minors. Commission president Ursula von der Leyen called it “a shame” that goes “against all the fundamental values of the European Union”.

In July 2021, the commission launched official infringement procedures against Hungary for failing to implement and comply with EU law. Later in the year, it also froze Hungary’s access to the COVID recovery fund. Unsatisfied with Hungary’s responses, the commission has now escalated the matter and referred the matter to the ECJ. This is the first time the EU has taken a member state to court over LGBT rights.

In recent decades, Europe has seen an increase in the use of homophobia to score political points. Examples include the manif pour tous demonstrations against same-sex marriage in France, and Croatia’s referendum to constitutionally define marriage as a heterosexual union. Hungary’s law has also inspired other countries, like Romania, to try and ban so-called homosexual propaganda.

The outcome of this case could have far-reaching consequences for LGBT rights in Europe. In effect, the commission is asking the court to enshrine LGBT rights as part of the EU’s fundamental values, on a par with other principles such as freedom of movement.

The EU and LGBT rights

Perhaps by taking legal action, the commission is enacting its own LGBTIQ equality strategy, launched in 2020. However, the commission’s claims frame the case as a breach of the EU’s internal market rules, rather than LGBT rights. This should not come as a surprise – the EU has very few direct laws on LGBT rights. By framing the case around core EU rules, the commission has a stronger chance of succeeding. In the past, the court has ruled on LGBT rights by invoking other fundamental EU principles.

The EU claims that by enacting this law, Hungary is violating both the EU charter of fundamental rights and Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union.

Here is where the case becomes interesting. Although the charter of fundamental rights has clauses that explicitly protect against discrimination based on sexual orientation, it only applies to Hungary when it is implementing EU directives. Article 2, on the other hand, has much broader applicability, but does not refer to LGBT rights at all. By submitting this court case to the ECJ, the commission is not only asking the court to determine when EU rules have primacy over member state rules but also to clarify that the rather ambiguously defined European values explicitly include LGBT rights.

How the case could play out

There are three possible outcomes of this case.

First, the ECJ could rule (for the first time) that the values outlined in Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union also include LGBT rights. This would be the more activist ruling – going beyond established case law for a more political statement. Hungary would then be required to adjust the law and remove its discriminatory nature. More widely, this would also be a watershed moment in European LGBT politics – it would not only provide a strong mandate for the commission to take bolder steps on LGBT rights, but it might also lead to more challenges of discriminatory laws across Europe.

Second, in a (unlikely) doomsday scenario, the ECJ could side with Hungary. This would provide nearly free rein for anti-LGBT actors in Hungary, and across the EU more widely, to enact more homophobic laws. This would leave the gains made in the last 50 years for LGBT people in Europe on shaky ground.

Finally, in the most likely scenario, the ECJ would deliver a ruling that sits somewhere in between. Based on previous case law, we might expect that the ECJ would rule that the Hungarian law violates EU rules, but only to the extent where the law has cross-border implications. In this scenario, the ECJ ruling would signal to Hungary (and other countries) that is it acceptable to discriminate against homosexuality, as long as they are smart in their wording.

Such a ruling would not clearly and unequivocally clarify that LGBT equality is a fundamental EU value, but rather leave LGBT rights as a secondary principle, subject to the more established EU principles of the internal market and freedom of movement. This would create ambiguity as to when homophobic laws are a matter of
member state policy, or when the EU has to (or can) intervene, giving homophobic governments license to enact more laws like Hungary’s.

Koen Slootmaeckers, Senior Lecturer in International Politics, City, University of London

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Because the world cannot risk actual nuclear war by engaging Russia militarily, Western Europe and the U.S. have been constrained to giving weapons and training to Ukraine. Consequently, in the eyes of security and economic analysts, this conflict is testing “whether economic retaliation can make an aggressor back down or whether only armed force can stop armed force.”

In the ideal, economic sanctions can provide a policy tool short of military force for punishing or forestalling objectionable actions. However, economic sanctions can also be a blunt and ineffective policy tool, disproportionately harming the most vulnerable populations while not changing the targeted government.

Economic sanctions are penalties levied against a country, its officials or private citizens, in an effort to provide disincentives for the targeted policies and actions and to force it to obey a law or public policy. The widespread economic sanctions against the apartheid government of South Africa in the 1980s, including boycotts and divestment, is exemplary of the potential of sanctions to achieve a more just and free society, without resorting to violence. Many other sanction regimes are not.

In 1990, the United Nations imposed sanctions that banned world trade with Iraq after that country’s invasion of Kuwait. The sanctions continued after the Gulf War in 1991 because of Saddam Hussein’s refusal to comply with the terms of the ceasefire. By 1997 one-third of Iraqi children were malnourished, and by 1999 the economy was shattered. Former U.N. official Denis Halliday called the sanctions “genocidal” and quit his post to speak out against them. Thirteen years of U.N. sanctions contributed to a serious reduction in Iraq’s per capita income, but dictators like Hussein generally ignore sanctions — and thus ensued a slow economic war that impoverished the civilian population. As one study noted, this resulted in the U.N. Security Council invoking more targeted, rather than comprehensive, sanctions.

In principle, sanctions are invoked to stem terrorism, narcotics trafficking, human rights violations, weapons proliferation and violations of international treaties. They have ranged from comprehensive economic and trade sanctions to more targeted measures such as arms embargoes, travel bans, boycotts, divestment and financial or commodity restrictions. Since 1966, the U.N. Security Council has established 30 sanctions regimes in many African countries, the former Yugoslavia, Haiti, Iraq, Lebanon, as well as against ISIS, Al-Qaida and the Taliban.

Notably the U.N.-sanctioned countries have not included powerful Western countries, though many have been involved in criminal war — including the U.S. war in Vietnam, the 20-year U.S./NATO war in Afghanistan and the U.S. war in Iraq, which included a handful of other European countries.

The Brookings Institute has noted that the United States uses sanctions increasingly “to promote the full range of American policy.” This somewhat neutral statement acknowledges that the U.S. commonly employs sanctions for geopolitical purposes — that is, to amass military or economic power against a rival and to promote regime change. Cuba is among the most notable failures of regime change. Six decades of a U.S. trade and travel embargo on Cuba accomplished none of Washington’s policy objectives: the overthrow of the Communist government, promotion of capitalism and stopping foreign investment by other countries. Currently, in the U.N. General Assembly, only the United States and Israel support the sanctions against Cuba. Moreover, studies have found that the longer sanctions last, the less likely they are to succeed.

Many studies conclude that sanctions are more effective against states with coherent structures of power and social cohesion — while being much less effectively used against dictatorships and failed states. However, that has not been the case with three of the longest sanctioned functioning countries with varying degrees of one-party rule in the cases of Cuba and North Korea and a combination of strong theocracy and weaker democracy in Iran. Note that in each of these countries the United States has historically had an oversized imperialist role: the Spanish-American War in the case of Cuba, the Korean War to contain Communism and the CIA-planned coup in Iran against the left-leaning, democratically-elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh. 

After withdrawing from its devastating and futile 20-year war in Afghanistan in August 2021, the U.S. quickly enacted economic sanctions against the brutal Taliban government, while also withholding Afghan people’s money deposited in the New York Federal Reserve Bank. According to Mark Weisbrot of Just Foreign Policy, these punitive sanctions, inevitably being borne by the Afghan people, “are on track to take the lives of more civilians in the coming year than have been killed by 20 years of warfare.”

Double standard sanctions

The Palestinian BDS National Committee that leads the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, “opposes war,” as they stated recently, “whether it is Russia’s illegal aggression in Ukraine today…or the many patently illegal and immoral US- or NATO-led wars of the past decades which have devastated whole nations and killed millions.”

They contrast their own BDS movement against Israel “to end complicity in Israel’s regime of oppression” that denies Palestinians “freedom, justice and equality” with that of current Western, xenophobic, McCarthyite boycotts and sanctions against ordinary Russians. Examples include banning Russian films and literature, removing Russian music conductors, refusing Russian patients in a German hospital, banning Russian citizens living in Russia from the Boston marathon, etc. The U.S. company Airbnb withdrew from Russia immediately when its invasion of Ukraine began, as did McDonald’s and recently American Express, even as these companies continue to do business in Israel and the illegal Israeli settlements.

According to South African jurist and former Judge Ad Hoc of the International Court of Justice John Dugard, “If the West fails to show concern for [Palestinian] human rights … the [non-Western rest of the world] will conclude that human rights is a tool employed by the West against regimes it dislikes and not an objective and universal instrument for the measurement of the treatment of people throughout the world.”

Perspectives on the outcomes of sanctions

Sanctions were not employed as an independent tool of foreign policy until the 20th century — and they were increasingly used after World War II, being viewed as a low risk (for whom, we must ask), high-profile response to aggression.

According to Robin Wright of The New Yorker, sanctions “generate meaningful change only 40 percent of the time” and can take a very long time to have effect. However, opinions on whether sanctions were the determining factor in resolving conflict or effecting foreign policy goals can vary. Take the case of South Africa: Many analysts agree that the demise of South Africa’s apartheid regime was largely due to widespread economic sanctions on South Africa in the 1980s. Others argue that a “highly mobilized Black-led coalition was the key.”

One of the most comprehensive studies of 170 cases spanning a century of economic sanctions “concluded that sanctions were partially successful only 34 percent of the time.” Where goals were modest, for example, the release of a political prisoner, the rate of success was 50 percent — whereas success in regime change or efforts to disrupt a military action was much lower.

The contradictions and ethical dilemmas of sanctions

Sanctions over time can cause similar devastation to civilians as war, punishing them more severely than their government. Moreover, they are often imposed by the U.S. — the most sanctioning country in the world — to seek regime change. The U.N. has estimated that U.S. sanctions against Cuba — the longest sanctioned country in the world — have dispossessed that country of “an estimated $130 billion in lost revenue,” consigning it to decades-long poverty.

Sanctions against other countries can be a consequence of past U.S. actions. In 1954, left-leaning democratically-elected Jacobo Árbenz was overthrown as president of Guatemala by a CIA-planned coup to protect the profits of the United Fruit Company. Brutal, U.S.-supported regimes since have committed well-documented widespread torture and genocide, for which Guatemala has been sanctioned by some countries, including, ironically, the U.S.

Similarly hypocritical is the sanctioning of countries — such as North Korea and Iran — for possessing or pursuing nuclear weapons, as if it is more a matter of who possesses these weapons of mass destruction than simply their existence that’s posing a threat to life on Earth. U.S. efforts at the state level to criminalize the BDS movement are likewise duplicitous, given the U.S. annual practice of selling weapons and giving more than $3 billion military aid to Israel and doing likewise for Saudi Arabia during its criminal war against Yemen. Sanctioning some countries for human rights violations while abetting others sullies the alternative-to-war potential and credibility of sanctions.

Sanctions infused with ethical intent

How do we help ensure that sanctions are both just and more likely to be effective in sustaining justice? A handful of disparate ethical sanctions movements — those of the 1980s South Africa movement against apartheid and the current Palestinian BDS movement, as well as the international fossil fuels divestment campaign — share certain characteristics. They were/are inspired by citizen-led grassroots groups and were joined in time by NGOs and institutions to differing degrees. Thus, they are largely free from the power politics of big countries and the U.N. (whether economic, military or geopolitical) that infect and undermine the justice intent of sanctions.

Given that many sanctions, especially U.N. sanctions, are intended to defuse and resolve conflict, there is a lesson to be learned from a sister effort in Liberia and the landmark 2000 U.N. Resolution 1325, which is focused on engaging women equally with men in peace and security within their countries. No one has spoken out more strongly in support of U.N. Resolution 1325 than Liberian Nobel Peace Prize winner Leymah Gbowee, who brought Christian and Muslim women together in her country to end its vicious civil war.

According to Gbowee, interventions and sanctions to maintain or restore international peace and security have been most effective when they are applied as part of a comprehensive strategy encompassing peacekeeping, peace building and peacemaking. Ending conflict through force, sanctions, and negotiation is only the first step to achieving enduring peace. Ongoing peace building and peacemaking at the community and neighborhood level sustain conflict resolution more reliably and build more lasting solidarity among people.

What do these ethical examples suggest for peace movements across the world regarding the current Russian-Ukraine conflict? We can mobilize to demonstrate unified international solidarity with antiwar protesters in both Russia and Ukraine. Our support should use media boldly and creatively to foreground our shared conviction that war is not the answer, and that war only breeds endless war. Post-war exchanges can bring Russians and Ukrainians together, as Palestinian and Israeli resisters to apartheid have done. Community-based peace building work, as the women’s movement in Liberia continues to do, is crucial for lasting reconciliation within former conflict-ridden societies.

Via Fellowship of Conciliation/ Waging Nonviolence

(Washington, DC) – The rise of populist leaders in the United States and Europe poses a dangerous threat to basic rights protections while encouraging abuse by autocrats around the world, Human Rights Watch said today in launching its World Report 2017. Donald Trump’s election as US president after a campaign fomenting hatred and intolerance, and the rising influence of political parties in Europe that reject universal rights, have put the postwar human rights system at risk.

Meanwhile, strongman leaders in Russia, Turkey, the Philippines, and China have substituted their own authority, rather than accountable government and the rule of law, as a guarantor of prosperity and security. These converging trends, bolstered by propaganda operations that denigrate legal standards and disdain factual analysis, directly challenge the laws and institutions that promote dignity, tolerance, and equality, Human Rights Watch said.

In the 687-page World Report, its 27th edition, Human Rights Watch reviews human rights practices in more than 90 countries. In his introductory essay, Executive Director Kenneth Roth writes that a new generation of authoritarian populists seeks to overturn the concept of human rights protections, treating rights not as an essential check on official power but as an impediment to the majority will.

“The rise of populism poses a profound threat to human rights,” Roth said. “Trump and various politicians in Europe seek power through appeals to racism, xenophobia, misogyny, and nativism. They all claim that the public accepts violations of human rights as supposedly necessary to secure jobs, avoid cultural change, or prevent terrorist attacks. In fact, disregard for human rights offers the likeliest route to tyranny.”

Roth cited Trump’s presidential campaign in the US as a vivid illustration of the politics of intolerance. He said that Trump responded to those discontented with their economic situation and an increasingly multicultural society with rhetoric that rejected basic principles of dignity and equality. His campaign floated proposals that would harm millions of people, including plans to engage in massive deportations of immigrants, to curtail women’s rights and media freedoms, and to use torture. Unless Trump repudiates these proposals, his administration risks committing massive rights violations in the US and shirking a longstanding, bipartisan belief, however imperfectly applied, in a rights-based foreign policy agenda.

The rise of populist leaders in the United States and Europe poses a dangerous threat to basic rights protections while encouraging abuse by autocrats around the world.

In Europe, a similar populism sought to blame economic dislocation on migration. The campaign for Brexit was perhaps the most prominent illustration, Roth said.

Instead of scapegoating those fleeing persecution, torture, and war, governments should invest to help immigrant communities integrate and fully participate in society, Roth said. Public officials also have a duty to reject the hatred and intolerance of the populists while supporting independent and impartial courts as a bulwark against the targeting of vulnerable minorities, Roth said.

The populist-fueled passions of the moment tend to obscure the longer-term dangers to a society of strongman rule, Roth said. In Russia, Vladimir Putin responded to popular discontent in 2011 with a repressive agenda, including draconian restrictions on free speech and assembly, unprecedented sanctions for online dissent, and laws severely restricting independent groups. China’s leader, Xi Jinping, concerned about the slowdown in economic growth, has embarked on the most intense crackdown on dissent since the Tiananmen era.

In Syria, President Bashar al-Assad, backed by Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah, has honed a war-crime strategy of targeting civilians in opposition areas, flouting the most fundamental requirements of the laws of war. Forces of the self-proclaimed Islamic State, also known as ISIS, have also routinely attacked civilians and executed people in custody while encouraging and carrying out attacks on civilian populations around the globe.

More than 5 million Syrians fleeing the conflict have faced daunting obstacles in finding safety. Jordan, Turkey, and Lebanon are hosting millions of Syrian refugees but have largely closed their borders to new arrivals. European Union leaders have failed to share responsibility fairly for asylum seekers or to create safe routes for refugees. Despite years of US leadership on refugee resettlement, the US resettled only 12,000 Syrian refugees last year, and Trump has threatened to end the program.

2016 in Numbers

In Africa, a disconcerting number of leaders have removed or extended term limits – the “constitutional coup” – to stay in office, while others have used violent crackdowns to suppress protests over unfair elections or corrupt or predatory rule. Several African leaders, feeling vulnerable to prosecution, harshly criticized the International Criminal Court and three countries announced their withdrawal.

This global attack needs a vigorous reaffirmation and defense of the human rights values underpinning the system, Roth said. Yet too many public officials seem to have their heads in the sand, hoping the winds of populism will blow over. Others emulate the populists, hoping to pre-empt their message but instead reinforcing it, Roth said. Governments ostensibly committed to human rights should defend these principles far more vigorously and consistently, Roth said, including democracies in Latin America, Africa, and Asia that support broad initiatives at the United Nations but rarely take the lead in responding to particular countries in crisis.

Ultimately, responsibility lies with the public, Roth said. Demagogues build popular support by proffering false explanations and cheap solutions to genuine ills. The antidote is for voters to demand a politics based on truth and the values on which rights-respecting democracy is built. A strong popular reaction, using every means available – civic groups, political parties, traditional and social media – is the best defense of the values that so many still cherish.

“We forget at our peril the demagogues of the past: the fascists, communists, and their ilk who claimed privileged insight into the majority’s interest but ended up crushing the individual,” Roth said. “When populists treat rights as obstacles to their vision of the majority will, it is only a matter of time before they turn on those who disagree with their agenda.”

Human Rights Watch

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Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban not only continued to defend his anti-immigrant bigotry but went on to say that Islam has never been part of Europe.

Mr. Orban not only is increasing the misery of largely Muslim refugees, but now he has erased 1300 years of European culture and politics, committing a sort of cliocide or mass killing of history.

The European “continent” is a little bit of an invented construct, but in any case it has been powerfully shaped by peoples who “came to us,” as Orban said of the Muslims. The Indo-European speaking peoples appear to have begun coming in from Syria and Turkey around 9,000 years ago. Hungarian as a language is probably Siberian from beyond the Urals, and its older forms show heavy Persian and Turkic influences. People in what is now Hungary did not speak Hungarian until well after people in southern Spain were speaking Arabic. Orban is clinging to a European nativism that has less historical grounding than that of European Arabs.

There isn’t a good way to exclude Spain or the Balkans from Europe. No history of either region could omit a heavy Muslim heritage. While it is true that Islam “came into” these areas from elsewhere, how is that different from everything else in Europe?

So too did the (Indo-European) Spanish language and the Slavic languages come into Europe from elsewhere. So too did Christianity, which invaded from the Middle East and was rejected until Constantine (and by many long after that). The indigenous European language in Spain was Basque. The indigenous religion was the worship of earth deities like Mari and Sugaar. The Celts perhaps brought a form of Druidism. Later on, many Spanish coastal cities such as Barcelona were founded by Phoenicians from Lebanon and they worshiped Baal. Christianity was a minor affair until after 313 AD / CE, and it is by no means clear that a majority of Spaniards were Christian in 711 when the Muslims began taking over the Iberian Peninsula. Only from 1492 was Islam largely liquidated in Spain, though large numbers of secret Muslims continued to live in Andalusia for perhaps centuries thereafter.

So Christianity had maybe a 400-year lead on Islam in western Europe, and Europeans belonged to neither of them in the heyday of the Roman Empire, the supposed crucible of classical Europe.

Sicily was an Arab Muslim Emirate 831–1072, with profound impacts on southern Italy. They remained a majority on the island until the mid-1200s.

The Ottoman Empire and Islam were central to the history of the Balkans and eastern Europe from the 1200s forward. While it is often thought that the Ottomans only had the Balkans, at some points their sway was much wider than that.

What is now Hungary was Ottoman Hungary 1541 to 1699.

The Ottomans did not simply preside over much of eastern Europe. People converted to Islam, largely voluntarily, or immigrated from Anatolia. European communities such as the Bosnians and Albanians have been Muslim for centuries. Maybe their Islam is a few centuries younger than the Christianity of Hungarians, but both religions came to that region from the Middle East long after the fall of the Roman Empire.

Muslim technology and culture had an impact. In the medieval period, Avicenna (Ibn Sina) and Averroes (Ibn Rushd) had an enormous influence on the Catholic scholastic thinkers. Avicenna’s medical work, the Qanun or Canon, was still taught at Leipzig in the early 1700s. The Muslim observatory at Maragheh in Iran produced astronomical observations that influenced Copernicus.

h/t Allaboutturkey.com

Ottoman policy deeply influenced the history and culture of eastern Europe, including that of Orban himself. The Ottomans favored Protestantism and especially Calvinism, playing an important role in protecting them in Hungary and Transylvania. That’s right. The 11.6% of Hungarians who today say they are Calvinists, including Orban himself, are there in some important part because Sultans like Suleyman the Magnificent and Selim II gave their ancestors a refuge in their dominions. Had Hungary been ruled by Catholics then, Protestantism would have likely been virtually wiped out, as it was in Catholic Spain, or, indeed, in the thin strip of Catholic Austrian-ruled western Hungary itself.

That’s right, Viktor Orban’s religious heritage was shaped and made possible by the relatively tolerant Muslim policy in Ottoman Hungary.

French jurist and thinker Jean Bodin (1530–1596) wrote of rulers like Suleyman the Magnificent:

“The great emperor of the Turks does with as great devotion as any prince in the world honour and observe the religion by him received from his ancestors, and yet detests he not the strange religions of others; but on the contrary permits every man to live according to his conscience: yes, and that more is, near unto his palace at Pera, suffers four diverse religions viz. that of the Jews, that of the Christians, that of the Grecians, and that of the Mahometans [Muslims].”

In other words, Bodin’s characterization of the Muslim Ottoman rulers who then were Hungary’s monarchs shows them to have been far superior to today’s Orban, who does not even seem to know that his ancestors benefited from living under their scepter.

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