Either rule of law applies to everyone or it applies to no one

The addition of retired Swiss intelligence officer Jacques Baud to the list of persons sanctioned by the European Council a little more than a week ago has shocked the community of Alternative Media, precisely because it indicates that the European Institutions have gone rogue, are trampling on the concept of freedom of expression with impunity and operating in completely opaque fashion so as to frustrate any possibility of recourse to justice by any of our dissidents.

Baud has now appeared on ‘Deep Dive’ and other widely watched podcasts to explain his situation. He has received moral support from serious people including state officials from a number of European countries. Though his bank accounts have been frozen and he is under a travel ban, friendly and decent people are giving him some assistance. Working through the proper channels, he may even get some humanitarian allowance access to his own funds. But I do not see that he is getting legal aid.

The issue raised by his case compels us all to put on our thinking caps and also to look in the mirror to see if we all have not in some way allowed government arbitrariness and disregard for due process, trampling on the sanctity of private property to go unchecked for too long, so that the latest acts of tyranny happening around us today are merely a continuation of preexisting trends.

I will not beat around the bush:  what we are now witnessing is shocking because it is happening to us.  Four years ago, at the start of the Special Military Operation, when it happened to Russians, we all had a good laugh.  Just think, this or that jurisdiction just seized the yacht of some Russian oligarch.  It was ‘rob the robbers!’ nothing more. 

I ask myself why I did not get hot under the collar when Peter Aven’s bank accounts in the UK were frozen so that he sat penniless in his London mansion and could not pay his butler.  Aven was the co-founder and co-owner of one of Russia’s most successful commercial and retail banks, Alpha Bank, that he has since sold off to be free of the associations that were used to put him on the sanctions list. Why was the seizure of his assets not troubling?  Perhaps because Aven was/is quite obnoxious as a personality.

But being obnoxious is hardly a criminal offense. Nor was he given a proper day in court when his assets were frozen. That came only years later.

Many of the wealthy Russians who were put on the personal sanctions lists of the EU, of the UK and other jurisdictions were accused of nothing more than ‘being a friend of Putin,’ or supporting the Putin regime and not denouncing the war.  As in the case of Baud today, these supposedly incriminating charges are vague and unenforceable in a court of law.  The sanctions were a political act of the given government of the day, not a judicial act, exactly as is the case of Baud today.

If we are troubled by the implications of the arbitrariness and extrajudicial nature of Baud’s being sanctioned, then we must go back to the very beginning of the confiscatory behavior of countries well outside the EU and including, by the way, the USA.  

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On thinking through the Baud case, I have been looking for some special reason why this man who made every effort to be objective in his written and spoken comments about the Ukraine war has nonetheless landed on the still rather short list of victims of EU tyranny.

My first conjecture was that maybe he had some personal enemies who decided to use the opaque procedures of denunciation to bring him down.  However, on second thought I see a more likely explanation in Baud’s very professionalism and respectability.  By career line, he had been one of theirs, not some shambolic peacenik. But then in his retirement he has spoken his mind, which does not match the mainstream narratives.

What I see in Baud’s punishment without a crime is the same as happened to a Canadian former diplomat, Patrick Armstrong, who had done service in Canada’s Moscow embassy in mid-career, if my memory serves me right. In the run-up to and first year of the Special Military Operation he was retired and occupied his mind by writing very good blogs on his own internet platform, all in the dissident vein.  Then one fine day in 2023 he received a visit from the Canadian thought police who told him that either he shut down his blog and instead looked after his garden OR his bank accounts would be frozen and his pension payments would stop.  Patrick made the right decision and we have hardly heard from him since.  This was just an example of the awful human rights watch of Justin Trudeau as Canadian prime minister, panderer to the neo-Nazi Ukrainian community in Canada.

The situation is not hopeless. On 19^th December here in Brussels there was an historic turning point when respect for international law won out over unprincipled theft and lawlessness at the level of the European Institutions.  Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever successfully stopped in their tracks Ursula von der Leyen and Friedrich Merz by refusing their demands that Belgium confiscate Russian sovereign assets on deposit in Euroclear to support a loan to Ukraine.  A sovereign state finally brought down the EU’s tyrants and the Belgian solution of a mutualized EU loan to Ukraine was decided upon. That should give us courage to take the European Council to court for violation of freedom of speech and other human rights.  This may not be pursued in EU courts but there are international courts that surely will hear the case if it properly presented, and that is also doable if authoritative expert lawyers come forward on a pro bono basis to help out.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2025