Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-04-24-Speech-3-081"
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"en.20020424.4.3-081"2
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"Mr President, recent events both in the Middle East and in the heart of Europe, in the French elections, have once again made us realise how thin, fragile and under threat of danger the shell that protects democracy, human rights and the structures of the rule of law can be. As Mr Van Hecke and Mrs Malmström stated, in the fight against terrorism we have also come up against totally new dangerous pressures that make human rights work more difficult than before. In these circumstances we are also in danger of being guilty of the same thing we accuse the governments of many countries of, which is to say a rhetorical commitment to human rights that fails, however, to lead to any purposeful and coherent action being taken. It is just empty talk.
We do not need the new agency that Mrs Díez González is proposing in her report; what we need instead is political will. We must find this political will in our own institutions, in Parliament, the Commission and, first and foremost, in the Council of Ministers, which has shown little but uncertainty and only now and again given a credible performance in the Human Rights Forum, which Mr Van Hecke once again reminded us of, to his credit.
Instead of merely praising and filing away Mr Van Hecke’s excellent report – and that also goes for most of Mrs Díez González’s report, which I think is very worthy of our support – we should for once take our own words seriously. When we adopted the report on human rights last year we decided that we would assess the working methods of the EU’s competent bodies responsible for human rights issues and democracy. We have not done that. We are expected to hold the other EU institutions accountable regarding the implementation of the EU’s human rights policy, but we have not done that. Instead we have settled for rhetorical commitments and fine words, which have also been heard here today almost
. For that reason I hope we shall for once take Mr Van Hecke’s report, and much of Mrs Díez González’s report also, seriously and undertake the relevant work accordingly."@en1
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