The Weekly Forum - 3 July 2026
07 juli 2026 | Forum for Democracy Intl
Forum for Democracy has now formally joined the Europe of Sovereign Nations party. This is the political party based on the European Parliament’s group of the same name. The party and the group include our old friends Mi Hazank (Our Homeland) from Hungary, Vazrazhdane (Revival) from Bulgaria, Reconquête (Reconquest) from France and our new friends from Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany, AfD) whose MEPs constitute half of the group. FVD’s founder and president, Thierry Baudet, and the leader of the parliamentary group, Lidewij de Vos, and others, attended the Party’s General Assembly in Berlin last weekend, followed by a Sovereign Nations summit at which Lidweij spoke.
At that summit, the ESN party, with the full participation of FVD, issued the ‘Berlin declaration’. This comes against the background of an immediate threat by the European Parliament to ban the ESN Party! The criterion for banning it is whether ESN upholds ‘the core values of the European Union’. The Authority for European Political Parties and Foundations has compiled a 300-page dossier explaining why ESN does not support these ‘values’ and the vote is likely to be carried next Tuesday, 7 July, in a plenary session in Strasbourg. This is the state of European democracy today. All the member parties of ESN are democratically elected and some of them (FVD for instance) have colossal memberships. Yet some office in Brussels gets to decide whether they qualify or not for election. This is surely the Iranian model of democracy, as practised currently in Romania and no doubt soon everywhere in the EU.
Meanwhile, FVD International director John Laughland spoke on a panel at the St Petersburg International Legal Forum last week. John had attended the Economic Forum in person earlier in the month. This time, for the Legal Forum, he was on a video link. The subject was human rights – those human rights which have been a key reference for Western foreign policy since the 1990s. John argued that human rights cannot be a legal concept since their very formulation, for instance in the European Convention on Human Rights, leaves to the law, and therefore the judicial system, the terms of their application. Even the right to life is circumscribed by law (Article 2 ECHR). So it is the law and the legal system which decides rights, not the various human rights documents which pretend to do so. These, by the terms of their own formulation, are legal nonsense and – according to John - should be abandoned as legal documents.
Watch John Laughland’s intervention here
The London City economist Ewen Stewart was our guest on The Forum this week. Ewen sits on the Growth Commission and is director of Global Britain, a pro-Brexit think-tank. His analysis of the state of Britain is devastating.