Can a homophobe be a suitable choice for EU Commissioner? This week saw Tonio Borg, Maltese Commissioner-designate for Health & Consumers, receive a particularly vicious grilling from a joint European parliamentary committee on his fitness to serve the Union.
The heat and intensity of the questioning, and the surrounding political furore, stemmed not from Mr. Borg’s positions on combatting public health problems, awareness campaigns, or such like. Rather, it came from his extremely conservative record of discrimination against gays, migrants and his questionable views on abortion.
Mr. Borg is reputed to have made many anti-LGBT comments, including complaining about having to “put up with gays” following a debate on rental law in Malta.
“That’s all we need now! After we’ve finally decided to limit inheritance to married couples and children, now we are expected to extend this protection. That is all that we need now, to put up with gays, too!” a European Parliamentary report quotes him as saying in 2009. Mr. Borg denied making this statement at the Hearing on Tuesday.
His public record on migrants appears even worse than this. According to an open letter headed by Platform for International Cooperation on Undocumented Migrants (PICUM), as Home Affairs Minister in 2002, Mr. Borg deported some 220 asylum seekers back to Eritrea where they were held “incommunicado detention and tortured.”
He has also been vocal in his support of the Italian policy of pushing migrants from Libya back out to sea, against the judgment of the European Court of Human Rights.
Mr. Borg has also voted against legalizing divorce as recently as 2011 and has attempted to criminalise abortion, acknowleged even in Malta as a conservative political move.
Despite this, Mr. Borg gave a commitment to the Hearing this week, that whilst he would not renounce his personal views, they would remain entirely separate from his work as EU Commissioner, saying “I will not be a Maltese Commissioner, I will be a European Commissioner”.
Hands up everyone who believes this? I thought so. The argument has been made by many in the Socialist grouping at the parliament, that he is the lesser of two evils. Due to convention, MEPs have to select a right-wing candidate this time. And positive noises have been made about the commitments Mr. Borg gave this week on upcoming anti-tobacco legislation.
This all ties in with the reasons Mr. Borg had to be proposed. In a series of suspicious circumstances, the previous Commissioner Mr. Dalli, had to resign because he had been named in trading standards report in connection with big tobacco. Nothing has come of this investigation however.
But it was known widely within Brussels circles that Commission President, José Manuel Barroso, wanted to water down tobacco legislation that Mr. Dalli was bringing forward in the new year.
The old Commissioner’s rapid departure seemed just a little too convenient. But Tonio Borg’s commitment to retain Mr. Dalli’s proposals in full may just be a slap in the face for conservative factions in the EU. What is more, European People’s Party (EPP) MEPs – Angela Merkel’s political grouping in the Parliament – received an even bigger shock during the committee hearing on Tuesday when Mr. Borg said he was in favour of women’s quotas on Executive Boards. The applause from Liberals and Socialists and shocked silence from the EPP was evidence enough of this.
And a special mention in this cricus should go to that paragon of hard work and parliamentary virtue, racist British MEP Nick Griffin, who when his name was called during the hearing to ask a question he had submitted…had clearly forgotten to turn up for work…
Bon weekend.
l’UE
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