No. Brown nominated Amos, but the EU decided upon Belgian diplomat Koen Vervaeke as the EU’s ambassador to the African Union this year.

According to The Times Britain will leave it to others to criticise Zimbabwe abuses:

Britain plans to avoid a confrontation with Robert Mugabe today at the EU/ Africa summit by staying silent during the main debate on human rights.

Baroness Amos, the former Cabinet minister standing in for Gordon Brown, believes that any attack from her will trigger the kind of media circus that the Prime Minister wanted to avoid by boycotting the meeting in Lisbon over Mr Mugabe’s presence.

The decision to leave it to other EU leaders to criticise President Mugabe is likely to create a storm of protest in Britain, not least from William Hague, the Shadow Foreign Secretary, who called on Lady Amos to “lay his crimes bare before all those attending”.

But Lady Amos, whose authority was challenged yesterday in a stinging attack by Clare Short, wants instead to talk about trade issues at a summit designed to revive EU influence in Africa –which many countries feel is at risk from China’s no-strings-attached approach and huge economic resources.

Ms Short, who preceded Lady Amos as International Development Secretary, claimed that Lady Amos was only chosen for the summit because she is black.

The attack will hurt because Lady Amos, who was born in Guyana, has taken a longstanding interest in African issues – and because Ms Short is well known and well regarded in many African countries.

Ms Short said: “I am afraid that there really is not any other explanation. I don’t see any reason to send a kind of pseudo-minister and I think that it is not right to send her because she is black. I do not see any other reason for sending her.”

If Amos does indeed stay silent on human rights, then Short's suggestion that we should have only sent officials seems a smart suggestion. The EU seems pretty fed up with the UK approach:

Mr Brown drew stinging criticism for his refusal to sit down with Mr Mugabe from the President of the European Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso.

“If you are an international leader then you are going to have to be prepared to meet some people your mother would not like you to meet. That is what we haveto do from time to time,” he said.

However he promised that leaders would not turn a blind eye to allegations of human rights abuses.

“There has been a very negative trend in the Zimbabwe regime and this is something we will have to broach,” Barroso said.“But this is not just a summit to look at Zimbabwe."

EU leaders see the summit as a chance to embark on a new era of European-African relations and consign the master-servant dynamic to the colonial history books.

Seems we're trapped between the UK press and the EU!

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Give her Short shrift.

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Can you suggest what the good reason was for sending a non-Minister to a summit generally attended by PMs/Presidents and the like?

It would be more usual in such circumstances to send a junior Minister who would at least have some authority to negotiate, or just officials to monitor what happened.

Short just couldn't think of a good reason other than for PR - which seems about right, her exact words were:

I am afraid that there really is not any other explanation. I don.t see any reason to send a kind of pseudo-minister and I think that it is not right to send her because she is black. I do not see any other reason for sending her.

Anyway the summit looks like a flop, without coming to a general solution for the EU trade agreements that expire at the end of this year. Export tariffs will therefore be applied from 2008 to many African countries that are resisting a deal to slowly open up their domestic services and trade to EU companies. Looks like the rise of China as a prefered business partner in Africa will continue.

The Oxfam take on the deals is:

The free trade deals Europe is negotiating with Africa threaten to undermine development and push people further into poverty

and

"the Commission has ignored possible alternatives and insisted on the deadline ... They have essentially forced the East Africans to choose between guaranteeing markets for their agricultural exports today, and maintaining a degree of protection to promote future industrial growth - which all developed countries have done in the past."

It's a shame the UK press concentrates almost entirely on Zimbabwe & what Short said, rather than the subsidies, tariffs and free-trade issues at the heart of the summit.

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