Global News Journal

from Tales from the Trail:

Nobel award to Obama required lengthy U.S. Constitution check

When President Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize last October it caught most by surprise and sent his lawyers scurrying to quietly make sure that the president could receive the prestigious award without running afoul with the U.S. Constitution or federal law.

A provision in the Constitution, known as the Emoluments Clause, bars the receipt of any present, emolument, office or title of any kind from a "King, Prince or foreign State".  When the Nobel prize was established more than a century ago, Alfred Nobel's will specified that the recipient of the peace award was to be chosen by a committee of five people elected by the Norwegian parliament known as the Storting.

However, Justice Department lawyers told the White House in a 13-page legal memorandum -- sent to the White House counsel last December and released late Thursday -- that the U.S. Constitution and federal law did not bar Obama from receiving the prize.

The memo went through various legal arguments, such as whether congressional approval was needed -- no was the answer -- and the level of involvement by the Norwegian government in the selection process. The lawyers determined that the Storting had "no meaningful role" in selecting the prize recipients or funding the $1.4 million award.

Plus, the Justice Department lawyers added to their reasoning past precedent -- noting that two previous sitting presidents (Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson) had won the Peace Prize as well as a sitting vice president, Secretary of State, and a U.S. Senator.

It applied similar reasoning to determine that Obama could accept the award under a federal law that limited circumstances under which he could receive certain gifts and decorations.

Always good to check.

Sniping mars EU image and unity

The European Union seems to have developed a habit of shooting itself in the foot.

The latest self-inflicted wound was an attack on Wednesday by a euro-sceptic British member of the European Parliament who dismissed Herman Van Rompuy, the new EU president, as a “damp rag” who had no legitimacy and threatened democracy. 

The former Belgian prime minister sat just metres away in the assembly,  fiddling awkwardly with his tie.

This unseemly scene followed an attack on EU leaders this week by Greek Deputy Prime Minister Theodoros Pangalos, who is frustrated by the EU’s handling of his country’s debt crisis.

 ”The question is what the quality of leadership is and the quality of leadership today in the Union is very, very poor indeed,” Pangalos told BBC World Service radio.

He harked back to what he clearly regarded as better times at the EU by praising former European Commission President Jacques Delors, late French President Francois Mitterrand, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl.

 ” I don’t think the situation would be what it is today if that programme (to tackle Greece’s economic problems) had been discussed with Jacques Delors, Mitterrand, Thatcher and Kohl. This is another level of leadership which we don’t have today, most unhappily,” he said.

Does Washington care about the EU?

Try as it might, the European Union’s efforts to act like a bigger player in world affairs keep running into obstacles.

The latest setback is a report that President Barack Obama won’t be able to make it to the annual EU-U.S. summit this year, pencilled in for Madrid in May. A hectic domestic agenda and the fact the U.S. president made 10 foreign trips last year — more than any other president in his first year in office — means staying at home is the priority and the Europe Union will have to wait.

Spanish officials — Spain holds the rotating six-month presidency of the EU and is hosting the summit – say the White House has not officially withdrawn his attendance. As far as they are concerned Obama is still coming, even if the dates for the meeting have not yet been finalised. 

But doubts about the trip have been sewn and soul-searching has begun in Brussels about whether Washington even cares about Europe.  If Obama doesn’t come, goes the thinking, it’s a blow to those who believe the 27-country EU, with its impressive economic power, might one day stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Washington in international affairs, and act as a counterweight to a rising Beijing.

Obama may still decide to come, and even if he doesn’t, there is still the annual U.S.-EU summit in the United States, scheduled for the autumn. But rather than a ‘will-he-come-or-won’t-he?’ story, the debacle says more about the awkward institutional structure of the EU and why it’s a barrier to the region becoming more influential.

Obama was invited by Spain before it took on its six-month presidency on Jan. 1. But before that tenure began, the EU brought into force the Lisbon treaty, which reformed the bloc’s structure, creating a new president of the Council of Ministers, effectively an EU president with a renewable 2-1/2-year mandate, and a more powerful high representative for foreign affairs.

Even though Spain is hosting the EU-U.S. summit, it will be chaired by the new EU president, Herman Van Rompuy. Van Rompuy’s office knew nothing on Monday about whether Obama was attending, saying only that it had read press reports that he wasn’t coming. Officials referred calls to the Spanish rotating presidency in Brussels, which is in charge of planning summits and other meetings for the next six months.

Darfur: Is the war over or is the world losing interest?

It’s more than six years since mostly non-Arab rebels in Sudan’s western Darfur region revolted after accusing Khartoum of neglecting their remote corner of Africa’s biggest country. Khartoum’s U.N. ambassador, Abdalmahmoud Abdalhaleem, declared in New York this week that the “war in Darfur is over.”

But Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, disagrees. Although levels of violence in Darfur have fallen, he told the Security Council that crimes “are continuing.” He said those crimes include indiscriminate bombings of civilians, creation of inhumane conditions for displaced people in order to “exterminate” them, rapes and sexual violence, and the use of child soldiers. The ICC has already issued arrest warrants for Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, another government official and a former Janjaweed militia leader for war crimes in a government-led counter-insurgency campaign that drove more than 2 million from their homes. The United Nations says as many as 300,000 people have died since the conflict erupted in 2003, but Khartoum rejects that figure.

The ICC has also charged three rebels in connection with an attack on African Union peacekeepers in 2007. One rebel showed up in The Hague to defend himself but Bashir and the others remain at large. Western diplomats say Bashir’s arrest is not a top priority now since it could destroy the stalled Darfur peace process. Khartoum refuses to cooperate with the ICC and its chief prosecutor, whom Abdalhaleem branded a “mercenary of death and destruction.” (Moreno-Ocampo countered by declaring that Sudanese officials who deny that crimes were committed in Darfur could themselves face prosecution.) U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in his latest report to the Security Council that U.N./African Union peacekeepers in Darfur were being harassed and threatened by Sudanese government forces and rebels. (As if to illustrate the point, two Rwandan peacekeepers were shot dead in an ambush in North Darfur on Friday.) Ban said that civilians in Darfur remain at risk of violence as the Sudanese military continues to clash with rebel groups. The world body has also warned that the population of Darfur may be left out of next year’s nationwide elections, the first in 24 years, due to mass displacement of the population and volatile security.

But Khartoum and the rebels determined to topple Bashir’s government may not be the only problem. The former head of a U.N. panel charged with investigating violations of a 2005 arms embargo for Darfur accused the United States and other members of the Security Council of “selling out” the Darfur sanctions.

“Many member states of the U.N. Security Council that … imposed coercive measures on those responsible for the violence in Darfur now seem unwilling to fight back against those who let the abuses continue,” Enrico Carisch, a Swiss finance expert and former head of the U.N. Panel of Experts on Sudan, said in testimony to the U.S. House of Representative sub-committee on Africa and global health.

“Increasingly, it looks like poorly understood and under-enforced U.N. sanctions are being sold out in favor of mediation whose success is far from ensured,” said Carisch, who stepped down as chairman of the panel in October.

Carisch implied that the record of U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration on Darfur was worse its precessor’s. “In contrast to that leadership of 2004 and 2005, the United States appears to have now joined the group of influential states who sit by quietly and do nothing to ensure that sanctions work to protect Darfurians,” Carisch said.

from Raw Japan:

Friends with issues

They may be on first-name terms, but Barack's discussions with Yukio during his 24-hour stay in Tokyo have left unresolved a feud over a U.S. military base and deeper questions about the future.

They agreed to review the five decade-old U.S.-Japan alliance as both countries adapt to China's rising regional and global clout, and they agreed to resolve as soon as possible a dispute over the U.S. Marines Futenma airbase on Japan's southern island of Okinawa.

But President Obama and Prime Minister Hatoyama remain at odds over how to resolve the feud over Futenma - located in the middle of a city whose residents are sick of the noise and worried about the danger of accidents. 

Obama made clear he wants Tokyo to implement a 2006 deal under which Futenma would be closed and replaced with a facility on a less crowded part of the island. The agreement was part of a broader realignment of the 47,000 U.S. troops in Japan, including a shift of up to 8,000 Marines to the U.S. territory of Guam.

But Hatoyama said that comments during the August campaign that vaulted his party  to power had raised the hopes of Okinawa residents who want the base off the island.

High-level talks could begin as early as next week, reviving the headache the leaders played down at their summit before an APEC meeting in Singapore.

They can't let the base row drag on. The victory of an anti-base candidate in a local mayoral election in Okinawa in January would make it even harder to agree to implement the deal, even with some changes.