Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-03-13-Speech-3-034"
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"en.20020313.2.3-034"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, Commissioner Verheugen's statements on the Beneš decrees, which I expressly welcome, mark a noteworthy change in the Commission's attitude. Many initiatives, Commissioner, saw these issues as bilateral in nature and not to be put in the context of negotiations on European enlargement; I expressly welcome the way you have now abandoned this manifestly untenable position and I praise you for it. You obviously did this influenced by the public debate sparked by Mr Zeman, who, this House should note, has presumed to advise the Israelis to do with the Palestinians what the Czechs did with the Hungarians and Sudeten Germans after the last World War – which I consider to be the most monstrous
thing he has said. Such an attitude of mind has, though, no place in the European Union, and so, Mr Verheugen, I expressly welcome the way you have put discussion of these decrees into the context of the European legal order, recognising the political and moral issues involved, which go against the EU's legal order, and which are indeed obsolete, being incapable of having any future legal effect within the EU, and that what matters now is to make it our concern, in a spirit of good neighbourliness, that they do not constitute obstacles on the road to enlargement.
Questions therefore arise and demand to be answered. If the decrees have indeed lapsed, as the Czech government maintains, why were they not unambiguously annulled? If, though, they have not lapsed, and can still be employed in practice, indications of which are unfortunately numerous, how, then, can they be reconciled with the European legal order? And the pre-eminent fundamental question is that of what line the Czech government takes, not only on excesses but with the expulsion of entire ethnic groups as such, that is, on what we have unfortunately learned to call ethnic cleansing.
That the Foreign Affairs Committee intends henceforth to set in motion investigations by experts is therefore to be welcomed to an extraordinary degree, as these issues affect not only the EU's conception of itself as a community based on law, but also the foundations on which the EU enterprise rests. These issues must be clarified before we can actually complete enlargement successfully."@en1
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