Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-09-23-Speech-2-035"
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"en.20080923.4.2-035"2
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"Mr President, over recent years, discussion of terrorism in the European Commission and the Council has almost invariably sprung from self-evident acceptance of the protection of our fundamental rights. The almost equally inevitable consequences are perverse legislative proposals that violate these very rights.
A typical example is the proposal we are considering today, to combat terrorism on the Internet. This is based on the acknowledgement that some terrorists use the Internet to instigate terrorism, and that we must stop them.
However, the proposal concludes with the following extreme measure: to combat terrorism on the Internet, we should imprison any citizen who writes anything that could be interpreted by the police as being intended to
terrorism – not even ‘instigate’ it, mark you. Furthermore, anyone directly or indirectly supporting terrorist crimes is guilty. In other words, anyone who dares to express, verbally or in writing, a political opinion that could be interpreted as supporting terrorism is risking arrest. The proposal states elsewhere that people can be prosecuted, even if they have no intention of encouraging terrorism with their writings, simply on the grounds that their words, in the opinion of the police, had such an effect. In other words, one of the fundamental principles of criminal procedure is being completely overturned.
Fortunately, the Lefrançois report is here to restore the self-evident values of a democratic society to this crazy framework decision. It protects the freedom of the press and the contents of our e-mails from pre-emptive spying by the authorities; and it expressly states that criminalisation of any kind ‘shall not have the effect of reducing or restricting … the expression of radical, polemic or controversial views in the public debate on sensitive political questions, including terrorism.’ I hope the Council will accept these self-explanatory changes.
No-one in this House underestimates the need to combat terrorism, but when the fight against it gives rise to measures that ultimately gag our democracy, then the European Parliament, quite rightly, is obliged not to endorse them.
This is because – again, one of those self-evident truths that are in danger of no longer being taken for granted in today’s Europe – it is absurd to claim that we are fighting terrorism to ‘protect our democracy’ while proposing measures that are contrary to the fundamental principles of democracy. The moral superiority of democracy lies in the fact that there are many ways of responding and protecting it, but these certainly do not include pre-emptive monitoring of the thoughts and words of its citizens, let alone the pre-emptive gagging or criminalisation of the self-expression of those who disagree with what is self-evident to the majority.
I call on you to support the Lefrançois and Roure reports. To the Council in its absence I say, take heed."@en1
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