Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-12-01-Speech-3-135"
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"en.20041201.14.3-135"2
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".
Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, a time bomb is ticking on Earth, and its name is Aids. For several years, the number of new infections has again been increasing at an alarming rate. This rise also includes Europe, with particularly Eastern Europe affected, both the new Member States and Russia.
The majority of new infections involve young people aged between 15 and 25, and in particular women. A new carelessness has crept into their dealings with HIV and Aids. New medicines and therapies have improved the situation of HIV patients, so that the virus is losing its horror and thoughtlessness has become a way of life for many. Such thoughtlessness is lethal! The best protection against HIV is the use of condoms; this is a fact, and it should be supported and promoted by all sections of society. Abstinence is of course also a form of protection against Aids, but it should be left to individuals to decide whether they wish to practice abstinence or use condoms.
Moral appeals are of no use in stopping the spread of the virus. Instead, we need encouragement for each person to act responsibly, both for themselves and for others. It is the job of politicians to create the conditions that enable as many men and women as possible to make this decision freely for themselves.
The most important pillars of prevention are sex education without taboos and access to condoms, above all in schools and for young people. I am delighted that Commissioner Kyprianou placed particular emphasis on this.
In many African and Asian countries, Aids is depopulating entire regions, for example South Africa, where over half of the population is infected with the virus. This is no longer merely a disaster in human terms, but also in economic terms. I should like to appeal to the EU Member States’ sense of responsibility and the commitments they have already entered into. We welcome the fact that some Member States, for example the United Kingdom, Sweden and the Netherlands, have provided financial support for the international fund over and above what they committed themselves to. Unfortunately, some of the other Member States have either not met their commitments at all, or only in part. Aids is one of the twenty-first century’s global challenges. Above all, it is the task of the Western societies to put up a fight against this epidemic. We need discussions without taboos in Western societies on new methods of prevention, as especially African and Asian societies are dependent on help from outside, or, to put it another way, from us."@en1
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