Justice commissioner Viviane Reding has killed off plans to recast the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights as an 80-minute-long epic poem.
Concerned about what she viewed as a frivolous waste of time and money, Ms Reding, who is also responsible for fundamental rights and citizenship, has written a tersely worded letter seen by EUobserver to the director of the Fundamental Rights Agency, Morten Kjoerum, lambasting the plans.
“The language of the charter is already clear and direct,” she wrote. “I do not therefore see what is to be gained by running the initiative you have in mind in order to promote its accessibility to citizens. I rather see the counterproductive risk that the dignity of the charter is undermined.”
“This initiative does not provide the added value that is expected from the agency and is not in line with its mandate,” she continued, demanding to know how much time and money had been spent on the poetry plans.
EUobserver reported four weeks ago that the FRA had wanted the EU’s human rights charter recast as an 80-minute-long epic poem.
The Vienna-based agency had opened a process of contracting a poet to devise a composition based on the articles of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and hire a company of performers to accompany a presentation of the poem with music, a dance interpretation of the piece and “multimedia elements”.
The inaugural reading of the poem, whose working title is ‘The Charter in Poems’, was to take place at the bloc’s 2010 Fundamental Rights Conference in December on the tenth anniversary of the signing of the charter.
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