Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-07-09-Speech-3-481"
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"en.20080709.40.3-481"2
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"Mr President, paragraph 41 of the report reads: ‘urges that under no circumstances should European space policy contribute to the militarisation and weaponisation of space’. So far so good. Yet the entire report contradicts that statement. It actually lists military measures. Paragraph 5, for instance, states that there is a need for telecommunications, information management, observation and navigation in the military area. The report even underlines the necessity of the Galileo satellite project, which is quite clearly a civilian project, for autonomous ESDP operations.
I am grateful to Mr Verheugen for clarifying the budgetary aspects again. The European Union’s current Treaty provides quite clearly that the EU budget cannot be used for military purposes. That is why the GUE/NGL Group has tabled amendments to rectify the legal situation, to the effect that space may be used only for explicitly civilian purposes and that Galileo is an explicitly civilian project.
Looking at the other amendments tabled, it is interesting to see how contradictory some of them are. My favourite was the amendment by the Greens, which begins by stressing that Galileo must remain a space project for civilian purposes and continues by nonetheless acknowledging its importance for autonomous ESDP operations. That is clearly a contradiction in terms. We should make it quite clear that the issue here is the militarisation of space by the European Union.
It is easy to keep pointing the finger at others who are (also) pursuing the militarisation of space. Such military use is precisely what we do not want to see! That is why the content of this report, taken as a whole, as it is worded, is wrong, because it calls for precisely that militarisation. We reject that. We want space to be used for civilian purposes and want Galileo to remain a purely civilian project. We have now shifted the burden onto the taxpayer – EUR 3.4 billion – with this latest call for tender. We keep saying we want a system that is independent of the USA, but now Boeing is clearly interested in this tender, so that does not seem quite true any more either.
We want the purely civilian use of space, no militarisation!"@en1
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