Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-11-14-Speech-3-204"
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"en.20011114.9.3-204"2
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"Mr President, my group, the Liberal Group, wants to make three points, largely in the form of questions.
First of all – and this point will appear in the compromise resolution which is not yet in print but it is certainly in our own resolution – my colleague, Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne, points out that the United Nations is extremely slow, or has been in the past, to respond when there are reports of breaches of use of these weapons. For example, when Saddam Hussein, in the early 90s, used these weapons in the marshes of Iraq, it took the United Nations three and a half weeks to get inspectors there, giving Saddam Hussein plenty of time to cover up the evidence of his crimes. Would the Council kindly point out to the United Nations that we need a much quicker response than three and a half weeks if such incidents happen in future, as we fear may happen.
Secondly – and this appears in the Liberal Group's resolution and also in the compromise resolution – the anthrax problem in the United States has drawn all our attention to the need to react quickly and to analyse what is happening. There is no European Union-wide agency looking at this although, in the USA, there is the Centre for Disease Control in Atlanta. Would the Commission be willing to undertake to propose the creation of a European Union agency, under its control, which would coordinate the work of the relevant national agencies in our Member States in the field of communicable diseases? That would speed up our reaction and help us on a Union basis.
My third question is addressed to the Council. I hope it is a hypothetical question. If the investigations in the USA show that the anthrax outbreak came from Iraq and therefore American public opinion becomes overwhelmingly in favour of an attack on Iraq and – I imagine that George Bush would find it very hard to resist such overwhelming public opinion – what would be the Council's position? Would we encourage the EU to attack Iraq as well, or would we try to hold George Bush back? Has the Council considered this?"@en1
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