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Dear Colleagues,

At the time of writing this, less than forty-eight hours have passed since a resolution was about to be adopted at the UN in New York for forbidding all scientific research on stem cells, even for therapeutic purposes, using the cell nucleus transfer technique.
This resolution was presented by Costa Rica and supported by an intense preparatory action of the United States of America, Vatican City, Italy and Portugal and this with the support of 5 other EU countries: Ireland, Malta, Slovakia, Austria and Poland.

Belgium presented a resolution to limit the ban to reproductive cloning rather than the ban on therapeutic cloning (cell nucleus transfer). To the other EU signatories – Denmark, Finland, Greece, Sweden, the United Kingdom, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia – adding their official support are: France, Germany, Luxembourg, the Low Countries, Spain, Hungary and Slovenia. The total is: 18 member states of the EU.

The USA requested passing immediately to the vote. Belgium proposed to postpone it and seek a consensual decision after summoning a scientific conference on the subject.
Thanks above all to Turkey, who intervened in the name of the 57 adherents to the Conference of Islamic Countries, the meeting was set for next Friday.
Already numerous countries of the «Costa Rica – Vatican – Italy – Portugal» bloc realise that they have been dragged into a dubious action and seem to be able to join in with the proposition for a delay in order to think about a political confrontation that no one there dared bring to a religious or non-religious dimension, as is currently done in Europe and in the EU.
The United States, Costa Rica, Italy and Portugal seem to be in a great hurry. This is due to the fact that the front of a policy for the defence of freedom of research and conscience is finally getting organised at the UN, the United States – in their last hours of election campaign – in Europe and in the EU. The same political oukase is open and it seems clear on all fronts where it will develop. This is the state of the confrontation that has been imposed on us and which we did not recognise right away.


To the UN and the United States

Summoned by the Luca Coscioni Association, President of the Italian Radicals, and Marco Cappato, our former colleague not re-elected on 12 June, last 8-9 October the Constituent Session took place for the World Conference on freedom of scientific research, freedom of conscience, and active and passive therapy. Supported by most of the scientific world, it aimed at organising a democratic, liberal, lay mobilisation in view of the term of this UN General Assembly, which the great international democracies underestimated.
Marco Cappato, who will be with us today at Strasbourg upon his return from New York, has notified us of the following results:
1) Kofi Annan, to whom the Session appealed, pronounced himself officially at the meeting, at the beginning of the debate, in the sense we had hoped for;
2) (to date, but the number is increasing) 35 Nobel Prizes have underwritten our appeal http://www.radicalparty.org/stemcells/form.php?lang=en which heads in the direction proposed by the 17 EU member states who support the Belgian resolution, a resolution which we now submit for support to all European Parliament Members, and also to all the Commissioner and parliamentary candidates of all our countries;
3) «our» appeal (us democrats, liberals, lay, different clerics, believers or non-believers, united in the ethic of respect for all ethics, freedom and responsibility) has just been adopted by the «Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research». Hundreds of associations of patients, such as the Christopher Reeve Foundation, universities, such as the University of Stanford, Harvard and the Association of American Universities, as well as the Association of American Doctors belong to this coalition.
Without including the support of the Governor of New Mexico, Bill Richardson, former ambassador to the UN, of the leader of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Alan Leshner, of Nancy and Ronald Reagan and of Michael J. Fox.
Even the Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, has taken a position on the referendum in his state in order to support stem cell research, both embryonic and «adult».

This is certainly a very important event during these last days of election campaigning in the United States. But we didn’t go looking for it: moreover there are among us, in an evident manner, different positions towards the present United States, which go from good relations with certain «neo-cons», to the democratic world, passing through the networks of Georges Soros!


AND NOW WE COME TO OUR EUROPEAN, PARLIAMENTARY, POLITICAL, INSTITUTIONAL SITUATION


Dear colleagues,

Emma Bonino and myself, as members of the Transnational Radical Party, the European Liberal Party and the ALDE group, have pressed with conviction for the support of the candidate President Barroso. Today we are convinced of the fact that we do not have the essential knowledge for taking a decision. At present it was provided to us, at first by what was presented to us as the “Buttiglione case”, but what in reality is the Barroso-Berlusconi-Vatican City case and the case of the strongly minority politicians in the EU, next to the populations of Europeans, Christians, differently cleric or unbelievers.who

President Barroso is a politician with great and long experience, seasoned, intelligent and skilful. Emma Bonino and myself wonder how, aside from Silvio Berlusconi, he could have accumulated such blunders and errors and shown such arrogance…
Yet thanks to what happened at the UN, to the insults and falsehoods which their supporters seemed and still seem to be cornered in, we have understood: in reality, through these apparent blunders an absolutely minority group, borderline, extreme if not extremist, join the United States at this moment – under the influence of the political and fundamentalist madness which seems to have seized both the Christian and Islam circles – the United States (as we said), the Vatican City, Italy and Portugal were doing – or undoing – everything to succeed in a true POLITICAL oukase…

At the UN, and even more within the EU, we find ourselves faced with a deliberate action of enormous importance. The Italian government, Prime Minister Berlusconi, Mr. Buttiglione and President Barroso – until yesterday president of the Portuguese government – had not made incredible blunders. Without a too ambitious, risky calculation, we can’t liquidate the Mario Monti Commission (even though Berlusconi offered him the management of the Italian economy). And we can’t liquidate Emma Bonino’s candidacy (the most popular and prestigious of the former European commissioners), to face, without doubting the consequences, many difficulties in appointing Mr. Buttiglione leader of this policy (legitimate, yes, as much as any other) but absolutely minority among the 25 EU governments and peoples.


The anti-religious and anti-Catholic reasons and aspects for which we are reprimanded for cultivating and imposing, are nothing but a deliberate snare and falsehood to which the people who accuse us of it and interpret us thus are reduced and forced into. The “religious” reasons have nothing to do with this matter, no more than they did in the Dreyfus affair, in Georges Bernanos’ “The Great Cemeteries Under the Moon”, denouncing the blessings of the bishops and beggars to the Fascist armies going to Spain for their filthy killing, the differences between the militants of the White Rose and the Von Papens or the diplomatic “representatives” of the Vatican in Berlin, or between the “Christian Socialism” of Simone Veil, the Fabienne societies and the policies of the Concordats between the Vatican and the totalitarian states.
The confrontation is not between ethics and politics, but maybe between various ethics (one could be defined “absolutist”, against our claimed and defamed “relativism”), and certainly between different types of politics.



Dear colleagues,

The tactic is clear: we are probably going to be “offered” a lot more on the "Buttiglione" front, to save the essential: President Barroso and his Commission. So that he himself can underwrite and support a policy that have become “his” policy, the common policy on the front of freedom of scientific research, knowledge, ethics and morality (even religious), inside the Catholic world.
This “offer” will be made to us Tuesday, Wednesday or at the last minute.
It will be sold as something important: Mr. Buttiglione can even become the scapegoat, be dismissed from his functions or resign: his honour is in his faithfulness and obedience to power. POLITICAL POWER of the Vatican, the world “Church” and its hierarchy, whatever it is.
We must be ready and clear: the Parliament (as well as the UN) will vote for or against (this aspect of the policy of) Bush, Barroso, Berlusconi, anti-liberal, anti-democratic, anti-freedom of conscience, therefore also anti-religious, just as each time in history one tries to impose a policy in the name of God and religion.


THEN WHY A CLEAR AND CLEAN NOTE AGAINST PRESIDENT BARROSO, AND INEVITABLY AGAINST “HIS” COMMISSION? WOULDN’T IT BE A GREAT OPPORTUNITY FOR THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT, IN FACT FOR THE WHOLE EU?

We were told that a vote against the Barroso Commission would throw the EU into an “institutional crisis at the solemn moment of adopting the "Constitution"”. What madness! Altiero Spinelli has repeated to everyone: "There would really be no European Communities if the Parliament voted political no-confidence for the first time against the European Commission".
If in Rome there is no government (alas, were aren’t in it there!) because the European Parliament functioned. After decades, as the Parliament of a State of Right, democratic, this would be the second event, a real event, for this “historical” day.
After the Parliament elected in 1979, this would be a second democratic birth of and within the EU.
A great revival, with the first effect of its expansion, its reinforcement, institutional and political, against the constraints of the bureaucratic swamp dominated only by His Majesty d'Hondt!
A victory in Strasbourg would also be a great European, federalist, liberal, rights and freedom success for Brussels, New York, Rome, everywhere, for each one of us, at the “home” of our hopes and of a European people still to be built and asserted.

Marco Pannella
mpannella@europarl.eu.int

P.S.
I beg your pardon for abusing your attention and the hospitality of your e-mail in-box, but honestly I felt it even dutiful to give you some information as well as the evaluations that could result from it for me.
I would be very grateful if you would send me a reply, even a brief one, about what I have written to you, seeing that in the coming hours we will have to carry through our individual and group choices.
Thanks again,

Marco Pannella
mpannella@europarl.eu.int