Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-11-14-Speech-2-107"
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"en.20001114.4.2-107"2
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".
I voted, most decidedly, against the draft Charter of Fundamental Rights before us.
I did so primarily to denounce the anti-democratic way in which it was produced. From start to finish, the framing of the Charter gave rise to a series of takeovers by force:
A semantic appropriation, at the outset, regarding the name of the body drafting the Charter. Established as “a body” by the Cologne Summit, it declared itself a “Convention”, a name with unfortunate connotations of 1793 when the French Revolution degenerated into the Reign of Terror under another “Convention”.
An appropriation of parliamentary authority. The Court of Justice is going to be able to impose the terms of this text, whose definitive version was finalised by a Praesidium operating in a far from transparent manner, upon the citizens of our countries, even though it will not even have been ratified by our national parliaments, who, nonetheless, have exclusive jurisdiction over human rights issues! As for the Members of the European Parliament, they were not only refused the right to table amendments to the text of the Charter, but were also forced to vote on the Charter as a whole, which runs counter to the most basic democratic rules.
A takeover instigated against a whole raft of fundamental rights which, worryingly, were discarded from the text. So, for example, the absolutely basic fundamental right of the child to live with its father and mother, even though such a provision was expressly and insistently requested by a number of “Convention” members, was not adopted. The basic right to a nation, which was also demanded and which is also fundamental, was also censored. Any references to the religious heritage of our nations, even though this is explicitly mentioned in the majority of the fundamental texts governing our States, including France, making reference to the Supreme Being, and even though such references were included in the initial text of the Charter, were eliminated following pressure from several sides but particularly, it appears, from the representatives at the highest level of some Member States, in the name of an obscurantism which mistakes the exclusion of any religious reference from the state sector for legitimate secularism.
In the end, the haggling that this type of process inevitably leads to resulted in our weighing the notion of Europeans’ “religious heritage” against the promotion of “free enterprise”. No surprise as to what won the day. The limitations of the rule of consensus applied in this sort of context may be gauged by observing the Ubuesque and frankly grotesque choices it gives rise to.
Ultimately there is nothing European about the text of the Charter. As it stands, it could be adopted by just about any country in the whole world. The lot of processes of this nature is to produce texts which necessarily boil down to the lowest common denominator. The value of the content of such an exercise, quite apart from its illegitimacy, given that the European Union has no jurisdiction in the field of human rights, cannot clearly be seen since, in Europe, our freedoms are protected remarkably well by the founding texts of our nations and by the European Convention on Human Rights. The method used, the cuts made and the ambiguity surrounding the very nature of the text, on the other hand, shed a harsh light on the new totalitarian agitators at work at the very heart of the process of European integration."@en1
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