Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-04-27-Speech-3-025"

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"en.20050427.7.3-025"2
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"Mr President, for years, this House has – as is only right and proper – taken a sympathetic line on the cause of human rights worldwide. When this report then establishes that Moldova’s competing parties did not have equal access to the media in the previous ballot result and could not count on impartial coverage about the campaign, I am pleased that the rapporteur is concerned about such values as free expression of opinion and an independent press. In countries such as Algeria and Saudi Arabia, too, those values, according to this report, are trampled underfoot on a massive scale. This report, though, is very selective – after all, you do not talk about rope in the house of a man who hanged himself. Indeed, it could have occurred to the rapporteur that Belgium, which is, after all, the country in which this Parliament is based, suffers the same ailments as Moldova, Algeria and so many other countries. In my country, VRT, the public broadcasting corporation, which is funded by all Flemish taxpayers, has, in totalitarian fashion, decreed that it will not invite the largest party in Flanders, the to appear, which amounts, in effect, to censoring it. So it is that Flanders’ only opposition party is formally denied access to the public broadcasting corporation and gagged in the best tradition of the former East Germany. From now on, a politburo of left and far-left editors-in-chief, not unlike the Soviet Union’s former People’s Commissioners, will decide whether reports about my party can be broadcast; only those that depict the party in a bad light will be. No greater obsequiousness and venal sycophancy in respect of the establishment has ever before been displayed in the EU by publicly-paid journalists. The freedom of expression and the right to information from varied sources has become a joke in Belgium; this is completely at odds with the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights and the principles enshrined in the Charter of Fundamental Rights. I would urge all my fellow MEPs, irrespective of their party political allegiance, to sign the written declaration which we submitted today to lodge their concern about this of the media in my country and to denounce the totalitarian attitude of Belgian radio and television."@en1

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