Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-10-04-Speech-4-158"
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"en.20011004.6.4-158"2
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"Mr President, "Chronicle of a Death Foretold" was the title of a novel by García Márquez, that has now become a sad reality in the birthplace of the winner of the Nobel Prize for literature. The eight bullets that assassinated Yolanda Cerón, head of social care in Tumaco, were also foretold and once and for all destroyed the already precarious working conditions of human rights activists on the ground. For a year the paramilitaries have reigned in the town of Nariño. The government lets them do as they will and the list of the dead gets longer. Just before killing Yolanda, the paramilitaries publicly executed thirteen peasants in Teima. On Sunday morning, the former Culture Minister, who had previously been kidnapped, Consuelo Araujo Noguera, was murdered during a chase between the army and the guerrillas. Then, the day before yesterday, the paramilitaries assassinated Octavio Sarmiento, a Member of the National Congress. We know that anyone who defends human rights in Colombia is a target for the paramilitaries. A clean-up campaign was even announced in August. The government had already withdrawn the legal basis for the existence of the paramilitaries in 1989, but has never done anything to seriously dismantle them. On the contrary, the law on defence and national security, ratified by President Pastrana in August, made the situation even worse. The law, which is a real blank cheque for all sorts of violations of human rights, extends the army’s powers and freedom to act in a frightening way and reduces the power of the public prosecutor. The close links between the army and its illegal right arm, the paramilitaries, is well known and the "Human Rights Watch" report, published today, only serves to underline this.
The European Union needs to question the bases of its cooperation with Colombia. We are still waiting for the first six-monthly report on the progress of human rights in Colombia promised one year ago.
If the European Union takes defending human rights seriously, it should explain its criteria and mechanisms for evaluation and effective protection to us. If it takes the peace process seriously, it should encourage the pursuit of dialogue between the government and the guerrillas, categorically exclude the paramilitaries from the negotiations and support the report from the committee of experts, published on 28 September.
Finally, if it takes its own commitment to legal reform seriously, the first thing the European Union must do is to support the widespread calls for the law on defence and national security to be repealed."@en1
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