Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-06-20-Speech-3-379"
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"en.20070620.29.3-379"2
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".
Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to thank Mrs Roure for her speech and for her report. The political agreement reached at the Council last April, after five years of negotiations, was certainly highly significant.
This agreement, albeit on a less ambitious version of the framework decision than the Commission’s original proposal, in fact ensures that from the moment the framework decision enters into force and is transposed in each Member State, there will no longer be any safe haven in Europe for those who incite racial hatred, racism and xenophobia. This represents a political success.
I appreciate that the text of the framework decision contains penal provisions that could have been much harsher. I would have preferred stricter legislation. However, as the rapporteur has just said, we had to accept a compromise because, it being a framework decision, the principle of unanimity meant that we could not set our sights as high as we would have liked to.
Nevertheless, for the first time we have a common rule, stipulating that behaviour inciting hatred or discrimination based on race, skin colour or religion must be punished with criminal sanctions in all Member States. Consider how important it is to punish behaviour inciting anti-Semitic or Islamophobic hatred at a time in which we are talking about integrating immigrants from outside the European Union into our communities.
One of the main issues has certainly been to find the balance between criminal punishment for such behaviour, which is not free expression of thought but concrete incitement to commit violent acts and must be punished as such, and due respect for freedom of expression. We have worked hard on this aspect and I believe that the final result is satisfactory.
The measure is not intended to punish ideas, but behaviour inciting other people to commit criminal acts, to attack, to wound, to kill and to commit real acts of violence. All this has absolutely nothing do with freedom of thought. We are not punishing ideas, but those who, on the basis of a mistaken, if legitimate, idea, move from this idea to behaviour inciting others to attack and to commit criminal acts. This is the boundary between freedom of expression of thought, which must be safeguarded, and concrete incitement to violence.
This is why I believe this decision to be significant. It is for this reason that we have established the principle – which is highlighted in Mrs Roure’s report – by which a racist motive shall be considered an aggravating circumstance in all offences. If an ordinary offence involving physical violence is committed for racist motives, it must be more severely punished, since not only incitement as such, but also racist motives, make a given offence more serious than the act itself.
This is an important principle, and I believe that the fact that all 27 Member States have accepted it unanimously puts the European Union in a better position to uphold this key value listed in the Charter of Fundamental Rights."@en1
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