Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-11-13-Speech-2-064"

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"Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, first of all, I would like to welcome the Prince Regent and the members of the Laotian royal family, the leaders and those in charge of the Laotian human rights organisations, my friends, Massimo Lensi and Bruno Mellano, who were my companions-in-arms during the demonstration and over the following days in Laos. Ladies and gentlemen, I would once again like to thank you and President Fontaine, and all of you who supported the purpose of our action, which was and still is to free the five student leaders who were arrested in 1999 and about whom we still have no news today. I think that the issue that we raised is, of course, much wider, it concerns democracy, and the globalisation of democracy. At the beginning of the 1990s, Laos launched a process to bring about democratic change that, during the first five years, took the form of a number of openings in the economic sector. Since 1995, however, we have witnessed an extremely serious drift, a transformation of the Communist regime into an utterly ‘clepto-Communist’ regime, or rather into a hybrid of clepto-Communism and narco-Communism. This is extremely serious. The people of Laos face this every day, and they are dying in their thousands at the hands of this regime. Tens of thousands of Laotians, starting with the royal family of Laos, have quite simply been murdered in dribs and drabs. The European Union, and also the Member States, must therefore understand the tragic nature of the situation in Laos. We should first of all understand that the Stalinists and the drug traffickers who are running this country are preventing the democrats, both inside and outside Laos, and also those in favour of reform within the regime, from promoting reforms. Instead of continuing to support politically correct projects, such as the promotion of women, the promotion of rural development, the protection of the environment, which, albeit worthwhile, do not tackle the root of the problem, the European Union should specifically attack the root of the problem which is democratic change, penal code reform, constitutional reform and guarantees of fundamental rights. And I do not believe that the Commission and the Member States are doing what they should be doing in this area. We must therefore change our policy, re-focus on law and on the promotion of law, and this is what we are attempting to do with the text of this resolution."@en1

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