BREAKING: ‘You can’t Romain ‘ere!’ says Eurovision

Ahh, Eurovision. A giant continent-wide love-in; a progressive celebration where gays, transvestites and transexuals are celebrated and loved, where for one night a year Europeans celebrate being utterly magnificent, and where fabulous solidarity spreads throughout the continent.

Despicable Me’s Felonius Gru

However, when it comes to money, it appears that trans-continental love and friendship rusts to bitter ashes in the mouths of the Eurovision directors as it emerged today that Romania has been unceremoniously booted out of 2016 ESC over unpaid debts.

Romania's public broadcaster Televizunea Romana (TVR) is said to have unpaid debts from the past 5 years owed to the European Broadcasting Union (EBU). You can read the full statement here.

As a result, the Geneva-based EBU (yeah, it would be based in Switzerland, wouldn't it? Because no financial skullduggery ever happened in Switzerland ahem nazi gold ahem) withdrew membership services to TVR.

All of which means a few things

- The Eurovision feed will be blocked to Romania so no Romanians will be able to watch the ESC semi finals or the finals.

- The Romanian entry to the 2016 Eurovision contest, Ovidiu Anton's admittedly lumpen Moment of Silence, has been pulled from the 2016 contest.

- Romanians won't be able to vote, nor will the Eurovision Copenhagen hosts be handing over to Bucharest for the results of the Romanian jury.

- And the EBU are threatening further sanctions, including blocking the broadcast to Romania of this year's football Euro Championships and even the bloody Olympics. Oh, and presumably Junior Eurovision.

Which is a crying shame for Ovidiu, throwing his best Despicable Me shapes over the past few months, and even more so for the great Romanian people. Because of financial mismanagement of a few TV execs (possibly the Government, also), through absolutely no fault of their own millions of Romanians will miss the glorious ESC.

Talk about collective punishment - isn't that against the European Convention of Human Rights? Article 3 of the ECHR clearly states that "collective punishment is inconsistent with the general principles of international law", not to mention the EBU also contravening Article 6 (fair trial, which the Romanian people haven't had) and Article 7 (no punishment without law). After all, what use are they if a person (Romanian) can be sentenced without being personally accused?!

So come on EBU. What do you have to say to *those* charges? Hmmm? Nothing? Yeah, thought so.

Anyway, here's the middling Romanian effort that we're all banned from seeing in Eurovision now.

And a slow handclap for the EBU executives all around, please.

Tools.