Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-10-12-Speech-4-018"
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"en.20061012.3.4-018"2
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"Mr President, in its time, the ideology of human rights played an important role in undermining the destructive forces of totalitarianism. However, this ideology is now starting to mutate, or has mutated, into a caricature of its former self. The right of everyone to everything, rights instead of duties, the replacement of rights by privileges – these are the bounds of absurdity towards which we are moving.
How high minded it sounds – a Fundamental Rights Agency. But what form will this Agency take and what will it do? The grounds for the application to establish the Agency state that it needs to be given broader authority to enable it to implement the aims of the EU, a common foreign policy included. However, expanding the authority of EU institutions is a threat to the principle of sovereignty and subsidiarity. It threatens, for example, the implementation of such curious acts as the most recent European Parliament resolution on xenophobia. The problem lies in how the Agency should exercise its authority. Will it address genuine threats to human rights, or will it simply pillory governments that have fallen out of favour with the EU majority for one reason or another? Alternatively, it might devote itself to promoting privileges for certain minorities, or absurdly vague concepts such as gender equality in all areas, an issue which I have raised in this House on previous occasions.
It has been suggested that the institution of the Fundamental Rights Forum be deleted from the proposal for the Agency. Such a Forum was to include representatives of social, professional and ecclesiastical organisations, and also of religious and philosophical organisations. There is now only a vague promise of their involvement in the Agency. This means that everything will be decided by officials and politicians who will arrive at decisions by voting. The decisions will obviously be neutral ones. But how will this neutrality work out in practice? Let us take a recent example. The European Union is contributing to the UN Population Fund, which for its part assists the practice of forced abortion in developing countries. Amendments tabled by the Union for Europe of the Nations were returned again during this year’s budget debate. We demanded that the EU should not assist programmes which promote forced abortion. This derives from the Charter of Fundamental Rights and the provisions of the 1994 Cairo conference. The issue is, incidentally, totally separate from the debate on the legality or otherwise of abortion. It addresses freedom of choice, a fundamental human right, and one which the majority of this House supposedly acknowledges. However, the majority of members of the Committee on Budgets rejected these three amendments, thereby supporting coercion and rejecting the Charter of Fundamental Rights where third countries are concerned.
Whilst full of platitudes about the rights of various minorities, the majority of MEPs are of the opinion that we can use common European funds to finance activities such as forced abortion in China, where women whose pregnancies are at variance with government quotas are dragged out of their homes and forced to have abortions against their will, even in the ninth month of pregnancy. A year ago the Western press reported a series of drastic examples of such actions, but where were the advocates of women’s rights and the human rights then? It is not even a question of defending unborn life, it is a question of respecting fundamental human rights. Those who advocate abortion claim that the foetus is part of a woman’s body. I would suggest to you, ladies and gentlemen, that if it were a matter of forced amputation of a hand or a foot, the alarm would most certainly be raised. Yet a foetus is not even part of the body. It is essentially different. Whilst some regard it as a living being, others regard it as being of less value than any part of the human body. If the European Union ignores the rights of women outside its borders to have children, how can it defend human rights within its borders? This is hypocrisy on a colossal scale. Nice work: liberal democracy supporting coercion!
After this most recent experience I have considerable doubts as to whether the proposed Fundamental Rights Agency will not become just another instrument for political manoeuvring, in which common sense would always be outvoted."@en1
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