Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-02-09-Speech-1-047"
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"en.20040209.3.1-047"2
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"Mr President, in preparation for the Chinese president’s visit to France, the French foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, has come to Brussels to ask for the lifting of the arms embargo on China. The fact is that France is dreaming about concluding lucrative contracts with Beijing, which will push up its arms industry’s turnover, and so the Chinese president received an imperial welcome in France. Nothing was said about human rights; Tibet is being oppressed, but it would appear that the French president does not even know where it is. When you have the opportunity to sell some of your friend Monsieur Dassault’s Mirage jet fighters, you prefer not to think about a few boring old monks. Jacques Chirac, who can wax so lyrical about tolerance in his own country, evidently did not have the time to read the reports of the various human rights organisations, which, year in and year out, detail the Chinese offences: censorship, arbitrary arrests, overcrowded prisons, re-education camps and the absence of free expression of opinion. Jacques Chirac even managed to describe the forthcoming referendum in Taiwan as an act of aggression against China. That the European Union has no option but to do business with China is something we have to be able to accept, but supplying weapons is a completely different matter. We are therefore in full agreement with Mr Watson’s statement that this arms embargo is one of the last means available to the European Union, whereby it can force the Communist dictatorship in China to respect human rights."@en1
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