Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-07-03-Speech-1-071"
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"en.20000703.6.1-071"2
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"Mr President, Prime Minister, the Portuguese Presidency has been conscientious and committed, it has sought to cooperate closely with Parliament and I too should like to thank the Portuguese Government for this. However, the other side of the coin is the outcome of the Feira summit, and in my view the results for all fifteen Member States were more than disappointing.
I should like briefly to make three points. Firstly, the Presidency Conclusions say of the Intergovernmental Conference that significant headway is being made. I have to say that I find this difficult to understand because really everyone knows that in fact the Conference is not making any progress at all. Since then, additional ministerial meetings have been arranged and today the German press reported that in French Government circles even a failure is not being ruled out in Nice.
Secondly, many action groups and non-governmental organisations, but also a majority of the European Parliament and national parliaments, are calling for the Charter of Fundamental Rights to be incorporated in the Treaties. But no mention was made of this in Feira. There was no clear affirmative answer as to whether the Charter of Fundamental Rights will be legally binding, and I should like to agree with my colleague, Mr Voggenhuber, from the Greens that this is not the way to counter scepticism about Europe in our countries. The public do not want yet another grandiose-sounding piece of paper.
Thirdly and finally, it was not until paragraph 50 that the Heads of State and Government expressed their shock at the tragic deaths of the 58 refugees in Dover. I, Mr President-in-Office, am shocked that it did not occur to the Council to do anything more in response to this terrible tragedy than to step up the fight against so-called illegal immigrant smuggling. No thought was given to making even the slightest adjustment to the EU's policy of a European shield with its sometimes fatal consequences for people in need. But in my view this is precisely what is urgently required to prevent tragedies such as the one in Dover from being repeated.
What we need most of all is a return to international standards of refugee law and application in full of the Geneva Convention on Refugees. Drastic policy changes are required here precisely so that we do not continue to encourage those who make money out of trafficking in human beings."@en1
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