Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-09-05-Speech-3-321"
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"en.20070905.24.3-321"2
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"Madam President, the report prepared by the rapporteur, Ms Valenciano Martínez-Orozco, and the resolution before Parliament address a highly important but also increasingly complex instrument of the European Union’s external human rights policy.
Therefore, while keeping common base lines and targets for the dialogue, it would not be advisable to strictly align all their modalities. For this instrument to be effective it needs to be tailor-made and able to adapt to changing circumstances.
It also needs to be borne in mind that the various dialogues and consultations are in different stages of maturity. The dialogue with China or the consultations with like-minded countries have developed more or less consolidated modalities over several years and therefore allow for rather intensive, deep discussions.
In other cases, such as the dialogues with neighbourhood countries, we are still polishing the instrument and are in the phase of building up the necessary confidence to allow for genuinely meaningful exchanges.
We are therefore confident that, also in these cases, issues such as the desirable participation of experts from line ministries, involvement of civil society or the consideration of individual cases will eventually become possible once the exercise finds its own solid ground.
Finally, you can rest assured that the recommendations directed at the Commission will be examined carefully, and you can count on our commitment to improve the information to Parliament in order to allow for increased transparency of human rights dialogues and consultations.
Commissioner Ferrero-Waldner (who regrets not to be able to attend this debate today) had accordingly instructed her services to lend every support to the rapporteur in her difficult task of scrutinising the functioning of the human rights dialogues and consultations with third countries.
The report adds a further building block to Parliament’s remarkable work in assessing the EU toolbox on human rights, through its regular annual reports, the Agnoletto report on human rights clauses, the study of the European Inter-University Centre on the impact of Parliament’s activities in the field of human rights, as well as the study on the guidelines on torture. The report also usefully complements the regular review of the human rights dialogues and consultations undertaken by the Council and by the Commission.
The Commission would like to compliment the rapporteur and Parliament on its report and the detailed analysis and recommendations devoted to the European Union’s human rights dialogues and consultations.
The Commission takes the view that, of all human rights instruments at our disposal, it is the dialogues that probably provide the best chance to secure positive, long-term results in the development of the respect for human rights worldwide, as long as we are prepared to invest sufficient time and energy in them.
We firmly believe that the European Union can obtain success in advancing the human rights record of third countries only through patient work of bridge-building and persuasion, and this not just in its bilateral relations but also in the framework of multilateral bodies, as developments in the Human Rights Council demonstrate.
The great variety and number of European Union human rights dialogues and consultations with third countries – which, moreover, are steadily increasing – make any global evaluation very arduous.
Structured dialogues, such as with China; agreement-based dialogues like those with many neighbourhood countries; consultations with like-minded partners, such as with the US and Canada, or local troika dialogues with a range of countries all differ in many respects, be it their periodicity, the policy level, the kind of interlocutors, the depth of the discussions or the fact that some are combined with civil society events and others are not.
Far from being a shortcoming of the instrument, the Commission sees such variety as proof of the dynamism and potential of the dialogue instrument and an asset that should be preserved. The EU guidelines on human rights dialogues and the Cotonou (ACP-EU) Agreement both stress the importance of flexibility to take into account the different country situations, their evolution over time and the dynamic relationships between any given third country and the European Union."@en1
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