So European Voice reports that the Commission will next week propose making access to documents easier for EU citizens.

Interesting stuff. I rang up the press office to find out more.

Me: Can I see these proposals?

Press officer: I will send you what I can, but at this stage there may be information which can’t be published yet.

Me: I see. There may be information about proposals to facilitate access to EU documents, but I can’t have access to it?

Press Officer: …

Me: That sounds a bit funny. Does it sound funny to you?

Press Officer: I’m not an expert. This is the press office, and I will send you details of the number you need to call for general enquiries.

What is civil society? Some people think it’s a set of self-organising networks that are relatively free of state interference. It’s your local pigeon-fancying club, your church, your trade union, or the healthcare charity you sometimes send a cheque to.

Free and self-organising are the key words.

The vile interfering socialists in the EU think differently. Civil society is a tool for political and social engineering. Here’s the intro to a press release announcing one of their dreary conferences:

Non-governmental organisations, employers and trade unions, industry associations, charities, consumer bodies, faith groups, the media – civil society organisations are an essential part of European public life. They serve as a channel of communication with EU institutions and provide a forum for active involvement in preparing and implementing EU policy.

To sum up, civil society is a way of communicating with the EU and a forum for implementing EU policy. In case there’s any doubt about this naked social engineering, here’s what Commissioner Janez Potocnik said in a speech at the conference.

 Civil society organisations play a fundamental role during this process of change. They help developing a general understanding of how the EU works;… they enable citizens to feel part of the project.

Part of the project, indeed! The arrogance is incredible.

Bruno Waterfield has an update on the status of the President of Council. Will he be the supremo of Europe, or will the Commission claim that title for its own president. It’s half past eleven at night here, and I can only regard the whole sorry process with amusement.

This isn’t the right response of course. Half of me is wondering that Europe never managed to emulate the extraordinary thing that happened in Philadelphia two hundred years ago. European people have done wondrous things, politically, bringing down tyrannies and saying great things about freedom and democracy. But Europe has never equalled or built on the enlightenment ideals of the US constitution, and these events seem to show that it never will. Accountability and transparency are habits European societies find too hard to learn, apparently. Europe doesn’t do democracy.

Questions over the new President’s role, the size of his political team, and who should control a new “European External Action Service” will provoke a ferocious power struggle.

The European Commission is deeply concerned that the new post and a foreign service will pull the orbit of power from EU to national bureaucrats and diplomats.

Some governments also fear that the new EU diplomatic corps will suck in national diplomats with a mission creep that could undermine national prerogatives and turf.

“There are questions of where it is going institutionally, how big it is, to what extent national diplomats go in, or how they are seconded,” said another high-level European government source.

This is all important stuff. It is all being decided behind closed doors.

When the EU’s anti-terrorism czar was appointed in 2004, I remember reading a blog post somewhere that claimed he was the antichrist. The assertion wasn’t expressed as a euphemism to indicate Gijs de Vries was just a disagreeable chap, it was a genuinely-held opinion that de Vries was a signifier of the impending end times.

That was an isolated thought at the time. But since then, the moonbattery has increased and grown more elaborate. A comment to one of Bruno Waterfield’s posts in the Telegraph illustrates the extremity of some thinking these days. Essentially, it implies that europhobes should support islamic terrorism, as it may be the only hope for combating the overweening EU.

Am I spinning this out of proportion? I don’t think so:

At the moment, islamic terrorists are reviled. But we should be careful.

One day, we may come to rely upon them to take their war to the EU. If they did, there would be a groundswell of public support.

This one comment shows that the spectrum of euroscepticism is so broad it cannot hope to succeed politically.

Well, it’s something most people knew already, but the Advocate General has now immortalised the absurdity of the EU’s tendency to secrecy in a highly critical legal opinion.

On 25 September 2005, Gottfried Heinrich was stopped before boarding a plane by Vienna airport security who didn’t like the tennis rackets he was carrying. He boarded the plane, but was then evicted. His rackets, they said, were on a list compiled under Regulation 2320/2002 as potentially being weapons.

Feeling this was a strange idea, Mr Heinrich asked what else was on the list of potential weapons.  He was told it was a secret. So, rightly wondering how the hell passengers could avoid carrying things the EU considered weapons, he brought a case requesting the information to his local court.

The Regulation does indeed say “the measures relating to … detailed procedures containing sensitive information … shall be secret and not be published”. The list of banned items contained in an annex has therefore not been published.

But the Commission had already published a partial list in a press release, apparently breaking its own law. Faced with this contradiction, the court shunted the case upstairs to the European Court of Justice, which has now issued an opinion likely to reflect the judgment when it arrives.

Advocate General Eleanor Sharpston opines that the publication of the 2003 implementing regulation without its Annex is a defective and inadequate publication

She highlights the “fundamental absurdity” in the Commission’s position: If the Commission was obliged under Regulation 2320/2002 to keep the list secret, then publication of the press release was a flagrant violation of that Regulation. If the Commission considered that the list fell outside the secrecy obligation, it ought of course to have been published in the Official Journal. Furthermore, if the basic “guidelines” indicating the kinds of articles that are to be prohibited can be published there is little logic behind not publishing what is presumably, a fleshed-out version of those guidelines. Finally, she considers it to be self-contradictory on the part of the Commission to state, in recitals to subsequent regulations that there is a need to inform the public of the list of prohibited articles and then fail to place such a list in the public domain.

So the Commission will have to publish its list.  Dare we say that this is a case of one dangerous racket trying to prevent another dangerous racket?

What’s more, the AG goes even further in her criticism, and suggests the regulation be got rid of altogether as being totally against the Community legal order.

[T]he Court should go further than declaring the regulation invalid and declare it to be non-existent. She argues that the irregularity that taints the Regulation - persistent and deliberate disregard of the mandatory publication requirement of Article 254 EC in respect of the whole substance of the Regulation - is one whose gravity is so obvious that it cannot be tolerated by the Community legal order. Such a step would make it very clear that non-publication of regulations or parts thereof - all the more so when deliberate - is unacceptable in the legal order of the European Union.