Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-05-07-Speech-3-148"
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"en.20080507.15.3-148"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, advocating and defending human rights today risk becoming hollow gestures, especially if statements of principle do not follow specific events. For some time the European Union has pretended to be helpless against regimes that violate human rights, interested only in the advancement of trade and economic relations.
The Commission is increasingly undermined by the Council and the Member States in its strategies for promoting human rights throughout the world. For some time we have been witness to a conscious renationalisation of competences as regards the promotion of fundamental rights. Never before has the Commission been so weak in terms of proposals on human rights and democracy throughout the world, as demonstrated, for example, by the refusal to deploy the democracy clause that Parliament voted on two years ago.
Human rights are once again at the mercy of economic or military control, as evidenced by the ‘war on terror’ of the Bush administration. For this reason, it is important that the European Parliament continues to play a galvanising role in this area, for example with reports like the one by Mr Cappato. Of course, this report focuses exclusively on one aspect of human rights, an aspect that I would call ‘individualistic’.
Mr Cappato himself voted against our amendments, which sought to demonstrate how the promotion of human development and social, economic and cultural rights, as defined by the UN, are a prerequisite for the enjoyment of individual rights. It is these very concepts of interdependence and indivisibility of rights that define this idea.
Yet again, the rapporteur has resorted to drawing up a blacklist of countries in which the usual suspects are attacked and the most powerful evade criticism. With these amendments, we tried for example to throw a spotlight on the fact that Turkey is guilty of a policy of wiping out the cultural, political and social identity of the Kurds. This repression affects millions of people, but nothing has been done. In my opinion, the Kurdish question is the key to the future of a democratic Europe, all this together with general and generic formulations about human rights, which smack of double standards. This is why our group decided to abstain in the final vote."@en1
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