Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-02-14-Speech-3-008"
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"en.20070214.2.3-008"2
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".
Mr President, Commissioner, it was all of a year ago, in December 2005, that the European Parliament, in its resolution calling for the establishment of the temporary committee on the transportation and illegal detention of prisoners, reaffirmed – and I quote, ‘its determination in the fight against terrorism but stresses that this fight cannot be won by sacrificing the very principles that terrorism seeks to destroy, notably that the protection of fundamental rights must never be compromised.’ The Council shared those sentiments then, and it still does.
You will understand that I am unable, in this intervention, to discuss specific points in the report, for, firstly, I have no desire to pre-empt the various amendments that have been tabled, and, secondly, as regards the sections dealing with individual Member States, it is only right that the Presidency should abide by established custom and refrain from commenting in public on matters that are reserved to the Member States.
The temporary committee has, as a rule, arrived at its conclusions – some of which are far-reaching – and made its critical comments on individual cases and Member States, on the basis of publicly accessible documents and important witness statements. Assertions have a habit of turning rapidly into facts, and the Council believes that, in a number of instances, rather more cautious language would have been desirable, since no final judgment can be passed on certain of the issues discussed without comprehensive knowledge of the documents.
I do nevertheless think that the positions, on matters of substance, of Parliament and the Council are not as distant from each other as this draft report might lead one to surmise, and I am persuaded that all the EU institutions act on the basis of the same shared and inalienable values. In any case, the Council will continue to respect fundamental human rights and actively defend them both at home and abroad.
In July last year, my predecessor Mrs Lehtomäki stood where I am standing now and, speaking on behalf of the Finnish Presidency in the debate on the interim report from the temporary committee on the transportation and illegal detention of prisoners, stressed that – and I quote, ‘All action taken against terrorism must be in compliance with obligations under international law, and no compromises on these, where it concerns human rights, refugee or humanitarian issues, can be accepted in the name of action against terrorism.’ There has been no change in the Council’s position on this.
The European Union’s foreign ministers have expressed this principle also in dialogues with other states, whilst, in dialogue with our American friends, we have, in addition, made clear our concern about the situation in Guantanamo and urged the USA to close the prison camp there without further ado.
Mr Solana, the High Representative for the CFSP and Council Secretary-General, also stated his position on this when he was interviewed by the committee, stressing that the EU had always, in its dealings with the USA, based its arguments on the importance of the values we share, which are to be upheld in the fight against terrorism. It follows that the Council has already, for some time, been doing what the report calls for in this respect.
The work of the temporary committee on the alleged use of European states by the CIA for the purposes of transporting and illegally detaining prisoners, together with the Council of Europe’s investigations, have raised a number of important issues and heightened awareness of the importance of human rights. The committee’s hearings, its interim report and this draft final report, have their counterparts in a number of Member States, where this matter has been the subject of parliamentary and judicial inquiries, many of which have not been concluded. Such is the case with the inquiries being carried out in my own country, where a committee of its parliament is considering issues raised by your own.
Inquiries of this kind have in fact been called for in your report, and, with the subsidiarity principle in mind, this strikes me as the right level at which they should be held.
My reason for saying that is that, in many areas investigated by the committee, the European Union itself has no power to act, and I am thinking here in particular of the monitoring of the intelligence services. This is something that the Council, represented by Mrs Lehtomäki and by its High Representative Mr Solana, has had more than one occasion to point out to your House and to the committee.
You may well find that cause for regret, but the fact of the matter is that the treaties as they stand limit the Council's scope for action in these areas.
It therefore appears to me that the report’s reprimand to the Council for having allegedly failed to cooperate sufficiently with the Temporary Committee is not, in the final analysis, justifiable in view of the fact that both the Finnish and German Presidencies took part in plenary debates on the interim and final reports, and that Mr Solana and the EU’s anti-terrorism coordinator, Mr de Vries, took up the temporary committee’s invitations to appear before it, where they, as they were instructed to do, answered all its questions."@en1
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