Look out for Socrates!

Wednesday, July 4, 2007 at 4:22 | Posted in Blogosphere, eu | 4 Comments
Tags: portugal

As Germany handed over the EU presidency to Portugal a few days ago, I for one made a deep breath. None of the fears I had with the German presidency were materialized during the six month period. No new restrictions to freedom of speech in the web were decided. And what is most important, Ms. Merkel had a firm grip on maintainig unite EU positions in relationship with the Putin dictatorship in Russia. She also handled the Polish twin brothers Kaczynski dragging their feet in the voting system issue in almost an elegant manner.

Now that Portugal has taken over the presidency, I was wondering if there would be a valid reason to be conserned as a citizen of the World Wide Village. As it turns out, the Portuguese Prime Minister, presently also presiding over the EU council, Mr. José Sócrates seems to have trouble with understanding that freedom of speech in the web is not a matter to be regulated in his personal convenience. A quote from Meinparteibuch.org spells it out:

Howdy, what’s going on there in Portugal? Just a few days before he took over the presidency of the European Council, José Sócrates has filed a defamation complaint against the portuguese blogger Professor António Balbino Caldeira, who is publicly asking questions about the Prime Ministers 1996 licentiate degree in civil engineering from “Universidade Independente” since the year 2005.

The former Portuguese Prime Minister became the President of the EU Comission. Does not look like there would be even the slimmest chance that the same thing would happen with this Prime Minister.

Let us keep an eye on this guy. He might otherwise succeed in shutting us up before we have a chance to sneeze.