Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-12-18-Speech-4-027"
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"en.20031218.2.4-027"2
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"Mr President, I wish to begin by welcoming Mrs Schreyer, speaking on behalf of Mr Liikanen, and thank her very much for taking the opportunity to report back to us so soon on the Geneva Summit.
I was privileged to be there as part of a small group of colleagues from Parliament. I want to congratulate both the Commission and the Italian presidency for the very active role they took. I am sorry the Italian presidency is not here today, but I had a chance to meet the Italian minister and his team, who played a crucial role in negotiating what was a very well-balanced declaration and action plan.
I would like to pick up on some of the lessons that I learned. As far as the European Parliament was concerned, the STOA unit, Parliament's Scientific and Technological Options Assessment group – which had led the initiative to be represented there – had its own stand, in conjunction with the Commission. We were also represented at a very important earlier conference about the role of science in the information society, so there was no doubt at all about our engagement with the process.
The most important thing we must reflect on is that we do not just have a political declaration, we also have an action plan and we have two years in which to make some real demonstrable progress before this summit reconvenes in Tunis. In the context of these complex multilateral discussions, that is not a very long time. We have a big challenge to show that we in the European Union and the Member States are taking seriously the need to apply and extend the benefits of information and communications technology to the developing world.
As Mrs Schreyer said in the statement, the application of those tools to economic, social, health, educational and a whole range of other developments is extremely important. For me, one of the crucial lessons from Geneva – where so many developing countries showed us how they were applying information technology – is that we must develop expertise in those countries to enable them to develop projects on the ground that respond to their own particular needs, because every country starts from a different position in terms of infrastructure, economic development, learning capacity, etc. We are not looking for a one-size-fits-all solution, we are looking to disseminate our expertise.
One of my particular pleas is that we focus our attention where we really can help, which is on extending and encouraging research and development capability in the developing world. We want a stronger network of computer scientists and specialists working in universities and technology institutes who are linked together by a global research network. In that way they can develop their own solutions, and also draw on a much wider learning-community to help them develop the tools that they want – the standard applications, the other ideas – and they can exchange their work with each other.
The European Union has invested in the world's largest research network and we are already seeing it spread worldwide. We had the welcome news in Geneva that South Africa, for example, wants to join that network. So we can set an example.
My final point concerns our engagement as parliamentarians. It was disappointing that the summit declaration did not make any reference to parliamentary engagement at all. I spoke at a meeting of the Inter-Parliamentary Union with parliamentarians from many countries all over the world. There was disappointment that we are not more fully engaged but a determination that we should be better engaged in the next stage of the process. I would like to see us – perhaps with assistance from Member States and the Commission – develop a proper electronic parliament focusing on these issues, so that when we go to Tunis – and I hope that more colleagues will join us for that – we will be able to engage in the political debate. This is an area where Europe has so much to offer, but the whole engagement needs to be stepped up and integrated with an overall development policy."@en1
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