Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-04-11-Speech-4-163"
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"en.20020411.8.4-163"2
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"Mr President, a society that calls itself civilised, such as European society, which prides itself on its defence of human rights, cannot remain impassive when faced with the situation of many millions of children worldwide who are denied the rights we claim we want to defend; children condemned to death by AIDS or malnutrition, or through a lack of medical care, or who are destined to live in absolutely wretched conditions.
It is true that the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Action Plan approved at the 1990 World Summit attempt to guarantee that children are able to exercise their fundamental rights, but unfortunately, there has been no improvement at all in the situation, and children continue to be the main victims of poverty and underdevelopment, amongst other things. The statistics speak for themselves, and we should not forget that behind each of these figures hides the face of a child, whose eyes are pleading for our help.
For this reason, the special session of the UN General Assembly on Children, which is about to take place, should result in a firm commitment to transform the obligations arising from the Convention on the Rights of the Child into real action, establishing control mechanisms to supervise the extent to which these obligations are complied with, especially with regard to the fight against abuse, exploitation and violence to which children are subjected and to guarantee children the right to education.
But also, and above all, the Assembly should lead to a commitment to adopt more coherent and more generous development cooperation policies and policies to combat poverty, in order to guarantee every child’s fundamental right to decent living conditions. And, since the family is the fundamental unit of society and bears the main responsibility for protecting and raising children and the monitoring of their development, it is crucial that we also promote family assistance policies that contribute to the creation of the human environment that is essential to a child’s development and to his or her being able, in the future, to become a useful member of the community to which he or she belongs.
Parliament must give a clear mandate to the European Union in this direction. Therefore, on behalf of the PPE-DE Group, I would ask this House to support the joint resolution we are debating and the amendments we have tabled and which were already part of the text that this Parliament approved in July 2001 for this very sitting of the United Nations, which should have taken place in September; because, with this vote, we will make the cause of children our own, the cause of the European Parliament and the cause of the European Union."@en1
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