cuba and EU relations:
On March 12, 2007, during the meeting of the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva, Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt accused Cuba of not respecting human rights. This charge is purely ideological since according to Amnesty International’s 2006 report, Cuba is by far the nation that least violates human rights in the Americas, from Canada to Argentina [1].
(...) The Italian parliamentarians were certain that they ran no risk in Cuba and that is what explains their activism. Would they have the courage to support dissidents in Colombia, Guatemala or Honduras? Would they be brave enough to protest in the streets of Washington, denouncing the crimes against humanity that are daily committed in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo? Would they be brave enough to protest in front of the Italian military security secret service (SISMI), which “played an active role in the kidnapping of Imam Abou Omar in Milan in 2003” with the complicity of Silvio Berlusconi’s government, according to the EU report on the disappearances orchestrated by the CIA? Cowardice and duplicity are decidedly in fashion [10].
(...) On Feb. 14, 2007, the European Parliament published a report that accuses the governments of the Old World of flagrant complicity in the cases of forced disappearances and secret kidnappings orchestrated by the CIA. With monumental fraud, only one week prior these same governments had signed the UN Convention Against Forced Disappearances, which criminalizes the use of secret prisons. The European Union is expert in this kind of moral suicide [11].

for a world pàrliament (monbiot):
Those of us who want a world parliament are often accused of trying to invent a system of global governance. But there is already a system of global governance. The UN security council, the World Bank, the IMF and the World Trade Organization make decisions that affect us all. They do so without our consent. The best that can be said for any of them is that they operate by means of photocopy democracy. We vote for an MP, and this vote is then deemed to communicate our support for his party. That is then presumed to legitimize the government, which in turn assumes the right to appoint a prime minister. He then delegates ambassadors and bureaucrats to represent us globally, and their decisions are deemed to express our wishes. With every presumed transfer of democratic consent, the imprint of our cross on the ballot paper becomes fainter. Though the international bodies operate in our name, we have no more influence over them than the people of Burma have over the military junta. Global governance is a tyranny speaking the language of democracy.
(...) The purpose of a world parliament is to hold international bodies to account. It is not a panacea. It will not turn the IMF or the UN security council into democratic bodies - as they are controlled by the veto powers of their major shareholder and permanent members, nothing but abolition and reconstruction could do so.
(...) Those who claim, like the British Eurosceptics, that regional or global decision-making is unnecessary are living in a world of make-believe. No political issue now stops at the national border. All the most important forces - climate change, terrorism, state aggression, trade, flows of money, demographic pressures, the depletion of resources - can be addressed only at the global level. The question is not whether global decisions need to be made. The question is how to ensure that they are made democratically. Is there any valid answer other than direct representation?
(...) Global democracy has a special problem - the scale on which it must operate. The bigger the electorate, the less democratic a parliamentary body will be. True democracy could exist only in the village, where representatives are subject to constant oversight by their electorate. But an imperfect system is better than no system at all. Even the most pig-headed Eurosceptics would have trouble arguing that the European Union would be better off without a parliament.
(...) The recent fiasco surrounding the European constitution is a useful demonstration of how not to do it. First the people of Europe were presented with a meaningless question which makes a mockery of democracy. “Here is a document containing hundreds of proposals. Some of them will be good for you, others will be bad for you. You must agree to all of them or none of them. If you agree (and we will keep asking until you do), we will deem that you have consented to every measure it contains.” When this pantomime of managed consent fails, the managers announce – as Tony Blair did last week(3) – that a referendum is, after all, unnecessary: we will have a new constitution whether we want one or not, and it will be written and approved on our behalf.
(...) What jumps out as you read the list of signatories is the number of African names: there is a growing recognition in Africa that a world parliament offers the best chance – perhaps the only chance – that the unmediated concerns of the poor will reach the ears of the rich. A global parliament ensures that the voices of the poor world can no longer be ventriloquised by Bob Geldof and Bono and the leaders of the G8: the people will be able to speak for themselves.