Criticism of The FRA
The FRA attracted criticism even before it was created. The need for a new human rights institution was questioned given that human rights policy was a principal concern of the Council of Europe (CoE), of which all EU member states were also members. Terry Davis, then secretary-general of the CoE, was quoted with the remark: "With all the best will in the world, I can't understand what it (i.e., the new agency) is going to do." However, by 2007 he stated "I welcome the decision by the EU Council of Ministers to create a new Fundamental Rights Agency to scrutinise EU institutions and the application of EU laws. This is an important and challenging task."
Eurosceptics have criticised the Agency's cost and its perceived lack of transparency and ideological bias. A conservative Roman Catholic activist member of the Agency's independent Advisory Panel, Gudrun Kugler, alleged that the Agency's interest in homophobia was disproportionate. English Conservative MEP Charles Tannock said in 2005 that "the Agency will duplicate work of other bodies". In 2007 the British Conservative MEP Syed Kamall said: "The Fundamental Rights Agency will take £20m (30m euros) of taxpayers' money and use it to advance a partisan agenda with little accountability to anyone". Also in 2007 Scottish Conservative MEP Struan Stevenson spoke of a "quangocracy... every craze and fad that comes along, they say we must set up a new agency. A lot of them are playing to the gallery of political correctness."
In 2010 the conservative German newspaper Die Welt reported that the centre-right French politician Pierre Lellouche, then EU minister in the Sarkozy government, questioned "the added value" of the FRA when the Council of Europe already took care of human rights.
A briefing published in October 2010 by the London-based eurosceptic think tank Open Europe proposed the abolition of the FRA along with ten other agencies and institutes.
In 2008 the Irish 'pro-life, pro-family' lobbyist Patrick Buckley criticised the Agency for having "outsourced its key competence of providing expertise relating to fundamental rights" through a contract with the FRALEX network of outside legal experts. A Belgian lawyer and anti-abortion activist, Jakob Cornides, in 2010 was also critical of the FRALEX contract, and of the FRA for having published a report advocating civil partnership for same-sex couples.
Read more about this topic: Fundamental Rights Agency
Famous quotes containing the words criticism of and/or criticism:
“Cubism had been an analysis of the object and an attempt to put it before us in its totality; both as analysis and as synthesis, it was a criticism of appearance. Surrealism transmuted the object, and suddenly a canvas became an apparition: a new figuration, a real transfiguration.”
—Octavio Paz (b. 1914)
“As far as criticism is concerned, we don’t resent that unless it is absolutely biased, as it is in most cases.”
—John Vorster (1915–1983)