Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-09-05-Speech-3-332"
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"en.20070905.24.3-332"2
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"Madam President, I would first like to congratulate Mrs Valenciano on this report, which combines courage and ambition and I support her in all her proposals. Indeed, this report reaffirms the universality of human rights and anchors them as fundamental principles of the European Union’s relations with third countries.
However, although it is important to affirm and reaffirm the universality of human rights today, it is just as important, and even high time, to shed another dogma of international politics, and this is the illusion we use too often to reassure ourselves, namely that economic development will lead to democratisation and the safeguarding of human rights. The last few decades paint a different picture. Indeed we must notice that there is a two-speed evolution going on: on the one hand, we are currently seeing rampant globalisation at the economic level, and on the other, the sudden surge in democratisation, which produced democracies in Europe, Latin America and East Asia at the end of the Cold War, seems to be running out of steam. Instead, we should be noticing that all over the world, economic growth and authoritarian regimes often go together. On the contrary, rapid economic growth even seems to give these regimes legitimacy and to contribute to the stabilisation of their power.
Today quite rightly we are focusing our interest and concern on the human rights situation in the large emerging countries such as China and Russia. Do not be deceived, though: several of the countries that number among the most developed in the world – including some that are our economic allies – do not respect the fundamental rights of their citizens. I am thinking particularly of Singapore, a country with a prosperous and modern economy, whose population benefits from all the advantages of a developed country except political freedoms, and more specifically, freedom of expression and assembly.
Madam President, if proof of this were still needed, it was given in a way that could not have been clearer by the behaviour of the Singapore authorities towards a delegation of MEPs from my group in April this year, a delegation of which I was a member. The local authorities prevented us from speaking at a meeting with members of the Singapore liberal party under threat of arrest.
This experience, as disturbing as it may have been, was also very revealing and it once again confirmed to me that protecting human rights does not necessarily go hand-in-hand with economic development, and that the European Union, as it happens, cannot just make do with an economic approach towards the countries concerned. On the contrary, the European Union should continue to play its role of defending human rights and to remind foreign leaders constantly that human rights are for all humans all over the world."@en1
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