Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2011-03-09-Speech-3-487-000"
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"en.20110309.22.3-487-000"2
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"Mr President, I would like to start by expressing my gratitude to the shadow rapporteurs, with whom I enjoyed sound collaboration in the course of producing this report. The result is something that we can be proud of. A report was adopted in a vote of the Committee on Foreign Affairs by an overwhelming majority of 62 in favour and just 3 against. It is also very important, in this key portfolio, that we speak with one voice, not only in Parliament, but also in the European Institutions as a whole.
I am delighted that, through this resolution, we are expressing our support and solidarity with the millions of demonstrators who have taken to the streets since the disputed presidential elections of 2009. The opposition forces in Iran are in dire need of that support and solidarity now that they are seeing how regimes are falling and presidents resigning elsewhere in the Middle East. The Green movement must feel our support, as the opposition is once again looking for options for how to organise legitimate protests against the Iranian authorities at the risk of their own lives. The fact that that risk is real is proven not only by the arrest of the opposition leaders, Mr Mousavi and Mr Karoubi, but also by the wild and uncontrolled calls from a significant proportion of the Majlis, the Iranian Parliament, to have them put to death. In our resolution, the European Parliament calls on the Iranian authorities to fully and unconditionally cooperate with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), based in Vienna. It is precisely Tehran’s uncooperative stance that lends Iran’s nuclear programme its suspicious air. The concerns of the whole international community are more than justified. That being the case, in my view, it is incomprehensible to send a country like this the message that it has a right to enrich uranium. However true it may be, it is not the signal that the European Parliament should be giving at this crucial point in time. I therefore ask my fellow Members to support my proposals to remove these passages from our resolution. The resolution also goes into Iran’s role in the region. Certainly, in the wake of the documents leaked via WikiLeaks on the region’s perception of Iran, Parliament will serve Tehran well by sending it a clear message that it must bring an immediate end to exercising its destabilising influence. I therefore ask you all to support the amendments I have tabled on the role of Iran in its neighbour Iraq and on the removal of paragraph 53 from the resolution. In my opinion, the European Parliament already gives sufficient support to the idea that the Union and Iran should have a stable Afghanistan as a common goal in paragraph 55.
As I reach the end of my speech, Mr President, I would like to make one final remark. I am not thin-skinned, and it is precisely for that reason that I want to comment on Iran and its official representatives in Brussels and the national capitals. I have had the opportunity to take a look at correspondence from Iran to my fellow Members from various sources. The tone and the content of the correspondence must be called remarkable, to say the least. This report – I referred to this earlier – was adopted by the Committee on Foreign Affairs on which I serve by an overwhelming majority. For that reason, this resolution must not be seen as a private project of mine, but as a common stance of the European Parliament as a whole. It is therefore not the case that my background as chair of this Parliament’s first delegation determined the critical tone of this resolution. On the contrary, in that respect, Iran must be called to account for its own behaviour. The entire European Parliament – and I am thankful for this – accepts neither President Ahmadinejad’s anti-Semitic rhetoric nor the denial of the holocaust, although I have to say, unfortunately, that that anti-Semitism is not restricted to the inner circle of the regime."@en1
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