I have mixed feelings towards the announcement by the Malawian President that he is pardoning the two men sentenced to fourteen years imprisonment for the most heinous and indecent crime against the society and culture of Malawi, the act of—drumroll please for the sheer audacity of this offence—getting engaged.

Of course, it is a good thing that they’ve been pardoned, but the words of the President afterwards demonstrate the fundamental problem in the promotion of LGBT rights in Africa.

“In all aspects of reasoning, in all aspects of human understanding, these two gay boys were wrong – totally wrong,”

BBC News

“These boys committed a crime against our culture, our religion and our laws, however, as the head of state I hereby pardon them and therefore ask for their immediate release with no conditions,”

Mail & Guardian

Maybe I’m just reading the wrong Malawian newspapers, there is a more reassuring atmosphere presented in South Africa’s Mail and Guardian coverage of the matter, but one thing I can’t help but notice in the reports from the Malawi Daily Times are the many disparaging references to the opinions expressed by aid donors. Would it be too cynical to suggest that the pardon from the President, coinciding as it did with the visit of Ban Ki-Moon, was reluctantly given to safeguard the aid that is said to provide roughly half of the government budget?

I seem to be in a digital rights mood just now, what with my last post, and a Eurovision prompted foray into the EBU and EC’s positions on cross border media (I know, only I could go from the Eurovision Song Contest to the Audio Visual Media Services Directive in only two steps). I’m far from an expert on European broadcasting rules, and regulation of AVMS (to use the wonderful Eurojargon), my specialist area being development policy, but as an avid consumer of media, gulping down content from the UK, the Netherlands, and Belgium, to name but a few, it seems crazy that the directive is limited by not creating a common market for copyright. To get boring for a second, I shall reach for my copy of the Treaty on European Union, which states in paragraph 3 of Article 3,

“The Union shall establish an internal market … It shall promote economic, social and territorial cohesion, and solidarity among Member States. It shall respect its rich cultural and linguistic diversity, and shall ensure that Europe’s cultural heritage is safeguarded and enhanced.”

To me, these provisions suggest that a copyright licensing system that reinforces national borders and locks some truly fantastic content (naturally not just TV, but also music &c.) into the member states would be contrary to the principles on which the EU is built. I have a feeling it’ll take a tad more than an EBU workshop with Tom Dice and his guitar to make cross-border copyright work.

I was in a meeting last night, discussing intellectual property, at which one of the participants suggested that copyright is ‘un-green’. “Greens do not do copyright” were the approximate words used. As a green, and a content producer and publisher (no matter that few read the words I write and publish), I could not disagree more. The Thursday Briefing is licensed under a Creative Commons ‘BY-NC-SA’ licence, which is just the way I like it. You see, I like to have control over my content. After all, why should I give up control to something that costs me time, money, and effort to produce? But equally, I want to share what I produce with others, and allow others to take the posts that I produce, or the photos I take, and make interesting things out of them.

Take the photo below of some amusing graffiti in Paris as an example. If copyright law did not exist, and that work were in the public domain, I would have no right to stop a company, for example Underground Carrots PLC* from using it in an advertisement, and no right to receive royalties from its usage. Because of Creative Commons, based on copyright, I can licence it for non-commercial use where it is attributed to me.

Copyright law is good, but it is far from perfect. Without it, this blog, my personal blog, my photos on Flickr, and anything else I’ve published online, would be in the public domain, free for anyone to take and do what they want with. Call me old-fashioned, but that is not an appealing prospect; if it were the case, I’d shut this blog tomorrow.

* Naturally a fictitious company.

The lovely font used in the fake advert is Public Gothic, from http://www.a2591.com/2009/10/type-for-you.html.

I’m not sure why this election didn’t inspire me to blog in the way that I did for the US presidential election. It should have, what with it being for my own country and all, but I just didn’t see any reason to break out the custom election day theme, and live-blog it all. Anyway, I thought I’d better salvage this blog’s reputation as a political blog, and write something about the “con dem nation” (entirely plagiarised from Twitter) that we seem to have pieced together.

First off, isn’t it a bit odd to see at least one member of the European Movement as a Secretary of State in a Tory dominated cabinet? Perhaps I’m just putting too much emphasis on the European side of things. Anyway, my initial reaction to the BBC News footage of Cameron was, “could’ve been worse”, followed by noting that he’d opted for a plain microphone with no lectern (call me cynical, but was this his first theatrical step as PM?).

Policy-wise though, all I can say is that this government will be bad for Britain, and bad for Europe. Like the Irish Green’s coalition with Fianna Fáil, I think the Lib Dems will end up tarnished by their senior partner, hurting their chances in future elections, and thus removing any chance for them to show that, contrary to all evidence, they have some back-bone. The proposals for a referendum on AV are pointless; AV is pointless as an alternative, because it doesn’t do what an alternative electoral system needs to do, which is make Parliament more representative of the citizens. So, well done to the Liberals for capitulating on the one thing I wanted Liberals in government to do.

More in my sphere of concern is the impact of the new government on Britain’s place in Europe, and the effect that a Eurosceptic government in one of the big states will have. The Conservative’s insistance on calling for powers to be repatriated in some areas, and trying to put a brake on other areas will probably not hurt the EU too much. It’s a big thing, and it can comfortably withstand an uncooperative government or two. It will however hurt Britain. Enough Europeans (by which I mean people involved in Euro-politics) already complain about our intransigence, and that ill will towards the UK will probably only increase. It’ll be interesting, though perhaps uncomfortable, to watch how this affects the real world.

“I know very well that the stability pact is stupid, like all decisions that are rigid.”

Romano Prodi, 2002

Why, oh why did we not go for a stronger stability and growth pact?! If it could have been enforced properly, then Greece wouldn’t have been allowed to get into the state it is in, and the Germans wouldn’t have had one of their Euro worst-case-scenarios realised. I’m prompted to write this by the latest twist to appear in the tale, with Slovakia turning its contribution to Greece into an election issue. The Greek mess is one of the ultimate stress tests for the Eurozone. If the loans and horrible austerity being imposed on the, generally innocent, people who have been repeatedly lied to by their government about the economy work, then it will have passed the test; like the nuclear submarines that went to sea with sealed pressure valves though, the Eurozone shouldn’t be put through this again. Perhaps it’s time to revisit the Stability and Growth Pact, and come up with something that is more than a diplomatically negotiated name and a toothless policy.

It feels like every second conversation I hear on the radio, or see on the tv, about the UK election is focussed on immigration. Yet I’ve barely heard any discussion of the actual merits, the pros and cons of immigration. The conversation has been entirely about counting people in and, preferably in the opinion of many people it seems, out.

Being a sort of immigrant myself, and being from a family that moves around a lot, this pointless scaremongering with statistics annoys me. Right now, I’m taking advantage of the right to live in another country that is granted by the EU. I’m restricted, as is anyone working in another EU state, Polish plumbers, Greek grouters, and Romanian researchers included, from being a burden on the Dutch state. Soon, I hope to work in Brussels, paying tax to the Belgian state, and ultimately my dream is to settle in the Netherlands and take part in Dutch society, contributing my fair share, and receiving my fair share. Amongst itinerant Europeans and migrants in general, I don’t think this desire to be a contributing member of society is unusual. So why don’t we cut the repetitive statistical nonsense aimed to massage the fears of people. There are many things that immigrants do that contribute to British society, and there are many thing that British emigrants do to contribute to other countries. This isn’t where the big challenges facing society today are.