Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-06-06-Speech-3-117"
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"en.20070606.14.3-117"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, this Parliament has always followed the United Nations reform process constructively as an advocate of effective multilateralism. We want a strong UN, we want security and stability, we want an incisive war on poverty, and we want effective protection of human rights. As chair of the working party of the European Parliament on relations with the UN, I also have a very personal interest in the achievement of these aims.
When the Human Rights Council was established as a new UN instrument, we warmly welcomed its creation, because it came with a set of very enticing promises: genuine election of members, rational working methods and the universal periodic review of all members. And today? Our resolution is highly critical: Angola, Qatar and Egypt have come on board to join nations like China and Cuba, and elections with a choice of candidates are virtually non-existent. We only just managed to prevent the election of Belarus. Members of the Organisation of Islamic Countries are in the majority in both the Asian and the African regional groups. This means that they control and effectively block the activities of the entire Council, from country reports to the universal review. I am on tenterhooks, Commissioner, regarding the fate of the package that was presented yesterday. I hope we have grounds for optimism.
One of your remarks was particularly significant. You said that the European Union can easily be outvoted. This raises the question whether the West has done its homework. This is a question for the Council or, even better, the Member States. They were short-changed at the negotiations and did not even notice. This was clearly down to a lack of work on the part of our governments. But we parliamentarians must also ask ourselves whether our scrutiny, and that of our national counterparts, was strict enough. I believe it was not. This further reinforces the point that we parliamentarians must not leave the United Nations to our governments. We must strengthen the parliamentary dimension of the UN.
Mrs Ferrero-Waldner, I am delighted by your critical appraisal of the first year of the Human Rights Council, because that body did not fulfil the hopes which were placed in it. But the fact is that the institution exists and is still the main international forum. We must work on that basis, and I hope we shall succeed in backing the Council out of the present dead end. Lastly, I am glad that we are having this debate in Brussels and not in Strasbourg."@en1
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