Graham's blog entry 14th April 2007

Published on Sat 14th Apr 2007

I reported in a recent newsletter that consensus had been reached among the 27 member state telecoms ministers on the Commission's proposal to cap the 'roaming' charges levied by mobile phone operators for cross-border calls. Well, the legislative process advanced a step further this week with a positive vote in the European Parliament's industry committee. This is not the end of the affair: our internal market committee must yet have its say, the matter must be debated and voted on the floor of the House and after that there must be formal agreement between Parliament and the Council of Ministers. But we are advancing on schedule for a deal before the summer, so calls home on your mobile phone should be less expensive than before. Some operators have already started to cut prices in anticipation of the new law.

I was not in Parliament to witness the committee process, however. The week after Easter being relatively quiet, I seized the opportunity to take a delegation of LibDem MEPs to the Far East on a joint parliamentary mission with MPs from the Council of Asian Liberals and Democrats. So with colleague Fiona Hall from the UK and one MEP from each of Denmark, Spain, Luxembourg, Lithuania and the Netherlands I joined Liberal MPs from Cambodia, Thailand, the Philippines and Malaysia on a visit to support our counterparts in Indonesia and Singapore.

The former, with nearly 250 million people, is the world's fourth most populous nation. Since 1998 it has made remarkable strides towards liberal democracy. It has now a remarkably free press, a much more independent judiciary and a multi-party democracy with fairly decentralised government. The army is still too powerful, owning industrial interests which give it an independent source of income. There is still much corruption and rather too many of the government's anti-corruption prosecution cases are targeted at people linked to the opposition parties rather than the government. There are still occasional political assassinations (including a human rights activist who was recently poisoned on a Garuda flight to Amsterdam) and nobody has yet been held accountable for the near-massacres which took place when East Timor voted for independence in 1999 - though a presidential election there has just passed off peacefully and equitably. But it is nonetheless remarkable that a largely Muslim country is operating a form of liberal democracy in which inter-racial and inter-faith harmony is far greater than in many Asian countries.

We met former President Abdurrahman Wahid, also known as Gus Dur, who leads our sister party the PKB (Nation Awakening Party). Though now very old, almost totally blind and moving only with difficulty his mind is still sprightly and his sense of humour infectious. For over an hour he answered our questions about how a Muslim society can respect Liberal principles, even defending Salman Rushdie's right to publish The Satanic Verses and the Danish newspaper's right to publish cartoons lampooning the prophet Mohamed. For this he is not much loved in Iran; but since his time as President, Indonesia has become far more involved in helping to resolve conflicts elsewhere in the world, including sending troops to Lebanon last summer as part of the international peace-keeping mission.

After two days of talks about the development of democracy in Europe and Asia and meetings with MPs from the PKB and the PDIP (Megawati Sukarnoputri's party) - and after obliging my colleagues to try Durian, an Indonesian fruit which tastes delicious but smells awful (an experience once described quite accurately as being 'like eating peaches and cream in a gents urinal'), - we set off for Singapore.

As you may have read on the BBC's website and in some newspapers, we arrived in Singapore to find that our meeting had been banned by the government. They had put us in a Catch 22 situation by saying that we could not have a ALDE-CALD (Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe - Council of Asian Liberals and Democrats) meeting unless we had a local sponsor. Since our CALD sister party is Singapore's opposition Democratic Party, they acted as sponsor and were granted permission for a meeting but refused the right to allow non-Singaporeans to speak. I was not at all surprised, having supported SDP leader Chee Soon Juan in his scrapes with the Singapore government before. He has frequently been arrested for exercising freedom of speech and assembly and has been fined such huge fines by a government-directed judiciary that he is now personally bankrupt (and therefore not allowed to travel out of Singapore). But I found it rather stupid of the government to gag us just as the EU is finalising a Partnership and Co-operation Agreement with Singapore; and on the day on which the Singapore-based Asia-Europe Foundation, from whose activities the co-operation between political parties in Asia and Europe has developed, was celebrating its tenth anniversary.

The refusal of permission came just 24 hours before our conference was due to start. We made a formal request at a meeting with the deputy speaker of Singapore's parliament to have the decision reviewed; and the EU made a formal protest on our behalf to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but to no avail. So we sat on the platform at a public meeting on Friday night and said nothing, letting our Singaporean friends do all the talking. There were 100 or so people there, probably more than we would have attracted without the publicity surrounding the gagging order.

The Deputy Speaker had told us she could not intervene since the decision was a matter for the police. This implies that Singapore is a police state. Certainly I can think of only three other Asian countries where a similar ban would be imposed: North Korea, Myanmar and the People's Republic of China. This is the company Singapore chooses. It is the first time one of our ALDE-CALD initiatives has refused permission, and we've held them in places like Cambodia!

I'll report from Brussels again next week.