The European Union has banned three journalists — two Germans, Alina Lipp and Thomas Röper, and a Turkish national living in Germany, Hüseyin Doğru — from entering the EU, and frozen their bank accounts. The EU accuses them of “spreading pro-Russian propaganda”, “undermining or threatening the territorial integrity, sovereignty and independence of Ukraine”, and “destabilising” EU countries through their reporting.
In fact, they are being punished solely for engaging in critical reporting about Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Gaza.
The fact that challenging the EU-NATO narrative on the war in Ukraine or on the genocide in Gaza is now effectively treated as a quasi-criminal, de facto act of treason justifying extra-judicial punishment in the form of travel bans and asset freezes is nothing short of terrifying.
The ethical and legal implications are staggering: two EU citizens have effectively been stripped of their basic civil liberties — exiled from virtually the entire European continent and subjected to financial strangulation — through a simple act of bureaucratic fiat, without trial or court ruling. This is punishment without process, imposed by an unaccountable, out-of-control elite, in defiance of the most basic principles of the rule of law.
Making the ruling even more chilling is the fact that the decision is legally binding on all member states. That means that anyone who provides funds or resources to the accused journalists would also be in violation of the sanctions and could themselves be sanctioned as a result.
With the snap of a finger, EU officials have swept aside centuries of legal development. Core principles such as the separation of powers (whereby punishment should be the exclusive domain of independent courts), proportionality and the foundational concept of nulla poena sine lege — no punishment without law — have effectively been discarded.
In effect, EU elites have discovered a way to bypass all legal and constitutional safeguards against the repression of dissent, by weaponising a mechanism originally designed to target foreign entities, not domestic citizens.
The geographic scope of the ruling is also entirely without precedent: while in the past there have been isolated cases of individual states denying re-entry to their own nationals for political reasons, typically by revoking their citizenship, a practice broadly condemned under international law, there is no historical precedent for a supranational body imposing a travel ban on a citizen of a member state across almost thirty countries simultaneously.
This exposes the dangerous flipside of the EU’s supranational legal framework: rights that apply uniformly across all member states can just as easily be revoked across the entire bloc through mere bureaucratic fiat.
In the past, individuals facing political persecution in one European country could seek refuge or political asylum in another. That is no longer possible, especially when the persecution is orchestrated by the supranational and international authorities of the Union itself.
All Europeans who believe in democracy and the rule of law — whether on the left, the right or anywhere in between — must push back against this monstrosity, regardless of what they think of Röper, Lipp, or Doğru’s views. If we don’t stand up for them now, any one of us could be next.
Read my article about this astonishing story here: https://www.public.news/p/eu-travel-ban-on-three-journalists
Nothing. Nothing substantial would chance. It would be mildly amusing to see the reaction of the media and anti-China hawks in the US and Europe but that's about it. We'd have a few weeks of entertaining content and then the news cycle would move on.