Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-03-09-Speech-2-234"
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"en.20040309.8.2-234"2
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"Mr President, Guantanamo Bay should send a message to all citizens who are concerned about human rights in the world. In this American concentration camp on Cuban territory, international law and American law have been outlawed to almost universal indifference. The whole world can see this place where there is no law, this legal black hole as Amnesty International calls it, but does nothing. Individual liberties won with great difficulty over hundreds of years have met their death on the beach at Guantanamo Bay.
As the victim of the 11 September attacks, the United States was perfectly within its rights to arrest, charge and try everyone presumed to have been involved in those attacks. But there was absolutely no need to act unlawfully, or to lock the 660 detainees in animal cages that are floodlit day and night. The days of the lawmen of the Wild West are over. Nowadays, no one should be able to set themselves up at one and the same time as accuser, defender, judge and executioner – you might as well say torturer.
Such, however, is the macabre scenario adopted by President Bush for his ‘offshore’ justice in Guantanamo Bay. With the allied governments wallowing in cowardly silence, it was time for the European Parliament to react in a credible and audible manner. Mr Andreasen’s report on the Guantanamo detainees’ right to a fair trial therefore comes at just the right moment and I congratulate the rapporteur on behalf of my group.
The resolution on which we shall be voting tomorrow is addressed to the Council and calls on it to adopt a common position on this serious violation of the fundamental principles of law. As Commissioner Patten very rightly pointed out, such a common position is very sorely lacking. But that call will doubtless remain a dead letter so long as the absurd method of unanimous voting continues, allowing Europe’s voice on foreign policy and human rights to be silenced by just one dissenting vote."@en1
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