Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-09-05-Speech-3-339"
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"en.20070905.24.3-339"2
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"Madam President, this excellent report by Ms Valenciano Martínez-Orozco brings together, in a comprehensive fashion, Parliament’s analysis of the potential, but also unfulfilled potential, of the EU human rights dialogue. We demand action from the Council, sadly absent this evening. The EU’s human rights strategy will never achieve optimum results without being organised in a systematic and coherent way, and without transparency and periodic review.
Of course our credibility on human rights depends on practising what we preach. How can we urge countries like Jordan, Egypt, Libya, Morocco or Algeria to end torture, when we know that the United States subcontracted torture to them and that European countries colluded with that? Instead of being credible, we become hypocritical. Our own House must be cleaned. The silence of the Council, since our report in February on extraordinary rendition, does not go unnoticed.
One of the strongest dialogues we should be having is with like-minded countries, and I therefore welcome paragraphs 115 and 116, which urge the EU to seek syllogies and share experiences while addressing human rights concerns with the US, Canada, Japan and New Zealand.
But, in the last six years, while concerns about the war on terror have been shared by most European citizens, we have had no robust action by the EU to secure transatlantic respect for fundamental rights and the rule of law.
Of course, I am not saying the US is the worst human rights defender in the world. But it could be the model for human rights excellence and the tragedy is that the EU is not urging it in that direction. The Council’s torture guidelines say the EU will make démarches and issue public statements urging relevant third countries to undertake effective measures against torture and ill-treatment. What démarches? What public statements about abductions, torture, Guantánamo Bay? There is just embarrassed silence.
Perhaps an article in this week’s
magazine gives a clue. Headlined ‘Czechs with few mates’, it explains how the Czech Republic, in its three years of EU membership, has earned a reputation for promoting human rights at every turn. Great! Right on! Let us cheer! However, reading on, I learn that inside the Brussels foreign policy machine, such concerns are an irritant. EU diplomats apparently describe the Czech Republic as ‘out on a limb’, even ‘unprofessional’
no doubt the most disdainful insult in the diplomat’s armoury. Silly young Czechs! They believe the rhetoric about the EU being a human rights community. They thought Articles 6 and 7 of the EU Treaty, setting out our values of democracy, fundamental rights and the rule of law, were there actually to be acted upon! But the old cynics in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office or the Quai d’Orsay will put them right.
I am on the side of the Czech Foreign Minister, Karel Schwarzenberg, who sees no contradiction between being a friend of America and a critic of its human rights breaches. He opposes both the American trade embargo on Cuba and Guantánamo Bay. ‘I am against Guantánamo because I think it is a violation of human rights’, he says crisply."@en1
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