Word: klause
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...clav Klaus doesn't hide his scorn of the European Union. The irascible Czech President refuses to fly the E.U. flag over Prague Castle. He argues that climate change - targeted in one of the E.U.'s signature policies - is a myth. On his only visit to the European Parliament, in February, he bluntly compared the E.U. to the Soviet Union. So it is no surprise that the 68-year-old former economist should try to sink the Lisbon Treaty, which aims to overhaul the E.U.'s decision-making process and has been a decade in the making...
...With Ireland and Poland having signed on to the Treaty in the past month, the Czech Republic remains the only member still to ratify it. Last week, Klaus said he would not sign the document until it was rewritten. "I fear, and I am not the only person to fear, a deepening of E.U. integration," he said during a visit to Moscow on Oct. 14 to promote Blue Planet in Green Shackles, his climate change denial tome. (See 10 things to do in Prague...
...Klaus claims his resistance is in defense of ideals like freedom and democracy, but his treaty demands - including one that relates to a long buried dispute that goes back to World War II - are bewildering, say E.U. officials. While in exile between 1940 and 1945, the Czechoslovak government led by Edvard Bene? ordered that all German speakers in the Sudentland region of Czechoslovakia should be deported and their property seized. Klaus now claims that the E.U. Charter of Fundamental Rights, which is incorporated in the Lisbon Treaty, might become the basis for property restitution lawsuits by descendants of those German...
...though, has no power over issues of private property. Furthermore, the Charter of Fundamental Rights cannot be applied retrospectively. Klaus, says British Liberal Democrat MEP Andrew Duff, is merely posturing. "His demand is utterly spurious," says Duff, who helped draft the Lisbon Treaty. "If he had been truly concerned about the Bene? Decrees, he would have raised it much earlier." Duff says that by bringing World War II into a current debate, Klaus has overstepped a mark and forfeited his credibility. "It is not honorable or civilized for a chief of state. And it sends a signal to other nationalists...
...grudging admission by the Euroskeptic Czech President Vaclav Klaus in a newspaper interview published on Oct. 18 that he will ratify the Lisbon Treaty, a document designed to re-engineer the European Union's institutions to better match the realities of its expanded membership, has set off a race for the E.U.'s top job. The treaty creates two powerful new positions: President of the European Council and High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, effectively the E.U.'s Foreign Minister. Blair is seen as front runner for the presidency. (See pictures of the George...