Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-02-12-Speech-4-118"
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"en.20040212.8.4-118"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, today in Iran the conflict between conservatives and reformists threatens once again to throw an entire nation of this great Middle East into obscurantism and fundamentalism, into a pernicious and despairing arbitrariness. More than ever, therefore, and certainly more than in the past, our Community institutions must make their presence and influence felt among the conflicting forces in the Iranian Parliament, in President Khatami’s Participation Front and in Ayatollah Khamenei’s Guardian Council, in order to defend the universality of the values of the rule of law, democracy and human rights. These fundamentals should serve as a basis for negotiations and exchanges between the two factions, without which there is a risk of ending up with a State in which there is no rule of law, and to push that State or to push the cohesion of Iranian society and the geopolitics of this tormented region towards even worse scenarios.
The time has come to defuse the Council of Guardian’s attempts to disqualify reformist parliamentary candidates in the forthcoming general elections. In effect, the acknowledged absence of democratic rules and procedural transparency will end up discrediting the political rulers and encouraging their rejection. Those rulers have already succumbed to the suppression of freedoms, including freedom of expression, and they are the cause of the failure of economic and social development. To suppress all the democratic aspirations of the people of Iran, who are already worn down by years of war and revolution, would be to snuff out their last hopes and ideals, leaving the way open to despairing ideologies and extremisms.
The mobilisation of the European Union must be a matter of priority and it must be committed and pro-active, and must engage decision makers and all social categories or categories of activity. Any withdrawal, any ostracism on the part of foreign diplomats, would strengthen the retrograde and destabilising forces in a region of the Middle East which is as far from us in geographical terms as it is geo-politically sensitive in our view.
Any argument in favour of severing cultural links between Europe and the Middle East should also be rejected. The creation of a special parliamentary delegation to Iran proves this, the signing of the additional protocol on safety controls for nuclear materials confirms it, and the preliminary discussions between the European Union and Iran on human rights should convince us of it. These first signs must support and encourage the European Union’s approach to the Iranian authorities with a view to sending, right now, a party of observers to examine the electoral process and cooperating, right now, in judicial reforms and in the control of drug trafficking. At the present time, history is being made in Iran, and Brussels has learned enough from Munich in the past to be aware that it cannot refuse to make its voice heard now in Tehran."@en1
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