Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2011-05-11-Speech-3-098-000"
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"en.20110511.4.3-098-000"2
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"Mr President, I should like to thank honourable Members for what has been a full-ranging debate. Mr Albertini, I am happy to stand anywhere as long as it is actually in the room – I suspect there may be a few people who would prefer it if I was not – and I am very happy to speak from the podium; it is the obvious place between the two. I do appreciate very much the work that you, Mr Albertini, and the other rapporteurs have done in producing what I think are really useful and helpful reports in terms of addressing the breadth of European action.
And, of course, across Africa, I mentioned two countries, but we could talk about many more, not least as regards what is happening again today in Sudan and the importance of ensuring that South Sudan is created with the best possible chances of success
And then there is Ukraine, an important neighbourhood country which was mentioned I think by Mr Saryusz-Wolski and others too.
We have a breadth of things to do and we must continue to do all of them. So, honourable Members, I would just say to you it is important to recognise that.
Let me just, in the final minutes I have got, kill off a few of the myths which have grown up. I am not looking for a Security Council seat. I looked for proper status for the EU on the UN General Assembly, and we got that with nobody opposed to it, and honourable Members will know that took a lot of work, and I pay tribute to all of those involved, but we now have that stronger voice.
I think it is important too that we look at what we are really doing on CSDP; let us not mess around with descriptions that are not true. In Libya alone, we managed to support through our aid 55 000 people being able to get home. I did not oppose a no-fly zone in the European Council and Prime Minister Cameron will back that up; that is not at all what I said. What I said was that for it to be effective and to be done quickly, it was important that those who could act quickly should do so.
On our delegations, I support trying to strengthen what we have in our delegations opening in Benghazi, and what we do in Iraq. But let us not play this off against what happens in other countries like the Bahamas. The staff in the Bahamas are development staff from the Commission working on rural programmes, on agriculture, for some of the poorest people, and we should not, in my view, see this as being an ‘either/or’ situation.
Honourable Members, we have to do as much as we can to support countries across the world. So I end as I began by saying that we do not lack ambition, we need the resources to do the job properly, we need to be able to be consistent, we need to develop and strengthen what we do, and that is what we will do, but we will do it by taking the 27 Members of the European Union on that journey with us, leading sometimes, pushing sometimes, working alongside sometimes, and your support will be invaluable to that.
But I want to say, too, that there is greater coherence than perhaps anyone listening to this debate might imagine. We do have strong united foreign policy positions on a whole range of issues, from the breadth of our concerns on human rights to the specific work that we are doing on the Middle East, in our neighbourhood, on Serbia/Kosovo, on Bosnia, or in our approach in Africa, where we now look at the situation hopefully beginning to be resolved in Cote d’Ivoire but worrying today in Uganda.
All of these positions are worked out with the 27 Foreign Affairs Council ministers and I have to pay tribute to them. I think that we are moving inexorably to a greater sense of coherence. There is a lot more to do – I do not dispute that – and there is a lot more that you would wish us to do; but do not let us underestimate what we have already managed to achieve and the journey that we are on to do that. So I want to pay tribute to them and the fact that they often speak on behalf of all of us too; we cannot be everywhere in the world all at once. Today, we have Foreign Ministers in different parts of the world carrying messages on behalf of myself, on behalf of the European Union. That is an important aspect of what we do as well.
Can I say, too, that we are almost always the first to produce statements, the first to come out and say what we think should happen. It was my office that produced the non-paper on sanctions on Syria; we are in the driving seat. Not always reported, may I say, not always put forward in the press across the European Union, but we are the first to actually put out our statements and we produce hundreds of them to make the point consistently of the importance of what we do; and consistency is a critical factor in what is being discussed today.
In the course of our debate, we focused on certain parts of the world, but in the course of further speeches, honourable Members have raised a whole range of different issues which we still must continue to deal with.
Mr Salafranca talked about what has been happening in Cuba over the weekend with Mr Soto and we are looking carefully at that. We have asked for more information on that case because clearly that is an area of enormous importance.
Some honourable Members have asked about Gaza, about making sure that the aid is getting through, that we continue to support the people of Gaza – which we do, but we are engaged in a dialogue to increase and improve that.
Then there are the events in Nagorno-Karabakh between Azerbaijan and Armenia, where we have been in discussion with both, and where we are looking to support what France is doing in terms of trying to drive forward the process there.
In Albania, we have been in discussions with the Prime Minister and with the opposition to try to get the dialogue moving."@en1
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