I have no idea what is taught about the European Union in schools; nor for that matter what our students learn, if anything, about the Council of Europe.

As we get deeper into the European thing, the functions of both should be made better known. I say this because every so often somebody at the Council of Europe (CoE) – not to be mistaken with the European Council – comes up with an idea the time for which should never come.

Last week the (Christine) McCafferty draft report ‘Women’s access to lawful medical care; the problem of unregulated use of conscientious objection’, was presented to the Parliamentary Assembly in Strasbourg.

Only The Times picked up the story. This strongly suggests that the local media, print and visual, does little to inform itself of what is happening in an organisation where six Maltese parliamentarians sit in its assembly.

And yet, before the Treaty of Rome in 1957, eight years before, to be exact, the CoE was midwifed in London in May 1949, a reasonable location given that it was Britain’s war-time leader Winston Churchill who called for its creation in 1946, the organisation kicked off with 10 member states. Membership of the Council has since increased to 47 – Malta joined in 1965, seven months after gaining independence.

Its aim “is to achieve a greater unity between its members for the purpose of safeguarding and realising the ideals and principles which are their common heritage and facilitating their economic and social progress”. This explains why Portugal and Spain did not join until 1976 and 1977 respectively (after the restoration of democracy in both countries); eastern European countries and states that once formed part of the Soviet Union, including Russia, were only eligible to sign on after the fall of communism.

The Council of Europe, which may be regarded as a surrogate mother of the EU, does not have the sharp features of the EU and, unlike this organisation, has no jurisdiction over its members’ legislative and  executive functions. It is in the context of the CoE’s recognition of its members “ideals and principles, which are their common heritage…” that the recommendations of the McCafferty Report jarred so grotesquely.

The very idea of regulating conscientious objection (among other things that of healthcare providers in the context of women’s access to lawful medical care, into which read abortion, birth control, euthanasia and sterilisation), when the right to it is enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the ECHR, should be abhorrent to member states. For the Council of Europe to countenance, even, a form of regulation goes against its own promotion of the right to conscientious objection, a right, not incidentally, guaranteed by international, professional medical standards.

The problem with the discussions in Strasbourg lay not in the fact that they could influence rights that do not exist but that McCafferty’s Report aimed at removing rights that do; and even though the final outcome would not have been binding on Malta, the report could still have been used as a sounding board the echoes of which could have found their way on to the agenda of the  European Parliament.

As things turned out (and things do not just turn out; there are movers behind them who lobby parliamentarians and educate these where their education in this or that ethical-moral-social problem is lacking, or even absent altogether) McCafferty’s Report was not only rejected. It was, according to one source, “fully overturned”. Our six parliamentarians helped demolish the obscene ideas that informed it.

Among other things, the text adopted by the Assembly called on member states “to guarantee the right to conscientious objection in relation to participation in the procedure in question”.

What the socialist McCafferty, who was working towards a scheme that would name and shame members of the medical profession who refused to carry out an abortion and suggesting that governments, to quote Cristina Odone, should set up a “register of those who will not cut their conscience to suit the fashion of secular socialists” – what McCafferty made of the final resolution, one can only imagine.

A few words about her won’t be amiss. Last May she retired from the UK Parliament where she had the distinction of being one of that institution’s pro-abortion MPs. She also chaired the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Population, Development and Reproductive Health.

Ironically, or perhaps providentially, her attempt to restrict conscientious objection in what was her final report as a CoE assemblymember, was, again in the words of another source, “thoroughly defeated and indeed reversed”.

A final word about powerful lobby groups – the European Centre for Law and Justice (ECLJ) and the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child (SPUCK – UK) to name but two. Their contribution to the outcome was considerable, steadfastly moral and ethical, and intellectually persuasive. Remarks by the director of the  ECLJ, Gregor Puppinck, best summed up the reactions to McCafferty’s defeat: “The Council of Europe reaffirm(ed) the fundamental value of human conscience, and of liberty in the face of attempts at ideological manipulation of science and medicine.”

He added: “The McCafferty Report was an aberration and we are delighted that a large majority of deputies are poised to defend the values on which the council is founded: respect of liberty, of conscience and of life. Independence of science and medicine is also an essential value at the heart of democracies.” And most tellingly: “Effectively, (the McCafferty Report’s passage) would have (had) a bearing on the moral qualifications of abortion, euthanasia and of the exercise of the conscience: the ‘right to abortion and euthanasia’ would (have) become the rule and conscientious objection (would have) become the exception. To replace the fundamental right of moral objection to a mere exception amounts to a reversal in the moral relationship between abortion or euthanasia and conscientious objection (which would have) become in some way immoral because it is contrary to the ‘right of abortion’.”

Valletta gets down to it

It would be gauche to ignore the inconveniences that will be visited upon Valletta as the Piano project takes root as it uproots the hideous Freedom Square and the repulsive entrance to the city; but let us keep a sense of proportion, perhaps even cast eye and mind on what Berliners experienced after the reunification of Germany and the re-creation of their country’s Haupstadt.

I know we lack the German thoroughness that made possible the gigantic reconstruction programme of East Berlin without too many tears; although these there were – and inconvenience aplenty, but the put-upon Berliners were protected by a rigorous regime of site supervision and management of an area far larger than the whole of Valletta.

The planners in Malta have been charged with the threefold objective of building a theatre, a parliament and an entrance that will make visitors to the city gasp as they walk through it on New Year’s Day, 2013.

They have had enough time to get their act together, to work out the logistics involved, how to ferry tons of debris out, residents, visitors and shoppers, in. Nobody should expect everything to go hitchless; everybody is entitled to assume that project managers have catered for every snag.

It has been a long time in coming, a duration punctuated by political cussedness at times, inglorious decisions at others – like the building of the current monstrosity that serves as an open gateway to the city (a Nationalist government); like the horrendous square that was called Freedom Square (a Labour party government) – will it now be known as Parliament Square, or Theatre Square?

The former I reckon – like the decision to build government apartments on top and an unprepossessing shopping arcade below (a Labour party government) that were all right for the occupants and owners, but a sin against aesthetics; like the general tawdriness that has characterised the area for decades.

Puritans will continue to view what will slowly rise like a Phoenix from the drabness that existed until now with horror, some of it genuine, part of it feigned. Those who hankered for a resurgence of Barry will see their yearnings buried.

Those who feel that Parliament should be elsewhere will, I think, stick to that belief but the underfifties on the other hand, and future visitors to the city, will walk into Valletta in just over two years’ time and enjoy what meets their eyes. My preoccupations with that roofless theatre remain. We are now there; after nearly seven decades we have arrived and almost anything is better than not arriving. What is planned, however, what will replace the shambles that has so long existed is not just ‘anything’.

I believe that, generally speaking, the final result will merit and elicit a great deal of admiration. I need hardly add that this judgment will not be a universal one; I would like to think it will be as near to being Catholic as any sentiment or aesthetic experience can ever be.

In the meantime, what everybody expects is that the planners are well prepared, that for all the complexity of the task there is nothing in its execution, nothing in the work below ground, at ground level and above it, that will damn them for incompetence.