Did the Tories refuse to condemn Lithuanian hate law to appease their anti-gay Euro ally?

The Conservatives’ insistence that Michal Kaminski is merely the innocent victim of a smear campaign has been rather undermined by evidence (ably compiled by Sunder Katwala) that he has repeatedly misrepresented the details of his political journey. But Kaminski is not the only member of the Tories’ new European alliance to have been lacking in transparency of late: Tory MEP Daniel Hannan was also less than open with the readers of his blog when he failed to disclose that, thanks to their choice of friends in the European Parliament (EP), the Tories recently faced a serious conflict of interests over an EU motion criticising Lithuanian plans to introduce a draconian piece of anti-gay legislation.

On 17th September, the EP voted for a resolution criticising Lithuania over its so-called 'Law on the Protection of Minors.' In a post on his Telegraph blog a few days later, Hannan described the law in question as 'a pretty asinine piece of legislation', and likened it to Section 28, which was 'on the British statute book for nearly a decade and, throughout that period, was never once invoked.' That rather underplays the severity of the Lithuanian law, which, as I have previously explained, bans discussion of homosexuality not only in schools but also in any public place or media that could be accessed by young people. The law has been condemned by a raft of human rights watchdogs, including Amnesty. So 'asinine' hardly covers it.

Hannan goes on to claim that the EP’s adoption of the resolution criticising the law represents an infringement of Lithuanian national sovereignty. It is worth noting that he seriously misstates what the EU's intervention over the law amounted to. He opens his post by saying that 'MEPs have voted by 349 to 218 against a law recently passed in Lithuania', thereby implying that they had overturned or vetoed it, rather than merely criticised it. He then goes on to say:

This, though, isn’t really about equality; it’s about democracy. Lithuanians should make their own decisions through their own elected representatives. To have a duly approved statute challenged by the EU’s Fundamental Rights Agency – a body, by the way, which will have no legal basis unless and until the European Constitution Lisbon Treaty is approved, but which has been established anyway – is outrageous.

But the Fundamental Rights Agency cannot 'challenge' the law in any meaningful sense. It has no mandate to overturn national legislation: its remit is merely to analyse data, compile reports on the extent to which fundamental rights are respected, and offer advice to states that are trying to improve their record on respect for these rights. So, contra Hannan, the vote was about equality, not democracy. Unless, that is, Hannan thinks democracy is such a delicate flower that it is violated whenever a democratic decision is exposed to scrutiny of any kind.

Although Hannan is critical of the European resolution, he does not explicitly let on how he and his fellow Tory MEPs voted. In fact, (as I noted here) the Tories voted against successive motions to criticise Lithuania, before abstaining on the final resolution.

And here is something else that Hannan curiously fails to tell his readers: one of his allies in the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group is Lithuanian MEP Valdemar Tomaševski, who, as I have previously revealed, is not only on record denouncing homosexuality as a 'perversion', but also personally voted for the homophobic Lithuanian law in question in his national parliament, just days before vacating his seat to join the EP, and the Tories' new Eurosceptic coalition.

So, then: the Tories were offered an opportunity to endorse a resolution criticising a draconian Lithuanian law that constitutes an abuse of LGBT human rights, and they refused to take it. And later, when writing about the resolution, and explaining the basis of Eurosceptic opposition to it, prominent Tory MEP Daniel Hannan singularly failed to disclose the crucial fact that he is part of a coalition that includes a Lithuanian MEP who personally supported the law under scrutiny.

The Conservatives invite us to believe that their new European alliance alters not one iota their own stance on homosexuality. Presumably, then, they would want us to conclude that their refusal to condemn Lithuanian homophobia was borne of firm Eurosceptic conviction, rather than a desire to please, or avoid confrontation with, an ally whom the resolution would have condemned by implication. Nobody exercising a healthy degree of scepticism will think that this is obviously true. And it is still more difficult to think so in light of Hannan's conspicuous failure to openly acknowledge the Tories’ association with Tomasevski in the first place. On the contrary: the impression that the Tory position on Lithuania was affected by internal ECR politics is only increased by Hannan's (strategic?) silence.

There are, then, now reasonable grounds for suspicion that the Tory line on issues like homosexuality has already been, and will continue to be, at least partially determined by considerations of loyalty to their European allies. The concerns being raised about those allies are not mere smears on individuals. They express serious misgivings about what the Tories themselves now stand for, and how they will act.