Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2010-06-17-Speech-4-010"
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"en.20100617.3.4-010"2
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".
Madam President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, our group welcomes the statement by the Commission that we will fight to maintain the moratorium on commercial whaling. Now it is up to the Council to confirm this statement and, above all, to ensure that the 27 Member States speak with one voice. We cannot afford to delay this. We know from the meeting of the environment ministers that we do not have agreement here. There are some individual Member States that are pursuing different interests to the vast majority. Now that we have the Treaty of Lisbon, we ought to get used to the fact that we also speak with one voice in our foreign policy and in the representation of our values and interests in international organisations and not, as was the case in the past, each Member State for itself, which ultimately resulted in the weakening of Europe. We have seen this already at the CITES Conference. Here, our lack of agreement was ultimately a kind of powerlessness. We did not achieve what we wanted. I would not like this to continue in the International Whaling Commission.
2010 is the International Year of Biodiversity; in other words, the protection of ecosystems and threatened animal and plant species will be right at the centre of our efforts during these months. It would be a very bad sign if, in the Whaling Commission of all places, the moratorium was lifted and commercial whaling was permitted once again. We know that this animal species remains vulnerable. Our seas are becoming increasingly polluted and climate change will place yet another new strain on them. We therefore need to be very careful in our approach to this subject. The commercial interests of Japan, Iceland and Norway cannot take precedence here. Protection of this species and its ecosystems must determine our path.
We are seeing the abuse of the concept of ‘scientific hunting’. Japan is clearly killing 900 whales a year in the Antarctic Ocean under the concept of ‘scientific whaling’. That is blatant abuse and I fully support the concerns of the Australian Government, which also no longer wants to permit this.
We should do what the Commission has proposed in this regard. We call on the Council to create unity here so that we will speak with one voice at the forthcoming meeting of the International Whaling Commission."@en1
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