Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2012-04-18-Speech-3-170-000"
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"en.20120418.18.3-170-000"2
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"Madam President, liberties, as Aldous Huxley wrote, are not given, they are taken. He was, of course, writing in the British political tradition where civic freedoms and political rights are seen as legal entitlements that come from specific moments and specific contracts – the Great Charter, the Bill of Rights, or whatever. They are not seen as imminent, inherent or universal.
The problem with that alternative vision is the lack of enforcement mechanisms. If rights are just assumed to be there for everybody rather than being enforced by elected representatives, they can be the finest and noblest principles in the world and, without the means to enforce them, they are meaningless. Look at the constitution of East Germany or the constitution of Czechoslovakia or the Soviet Union. There, you see all these fine, high-minded freedoms and yet, as the peoples of those unhappy states realised, without democratic accountability, it is not worth the paper it is written on.
I will close by quoting Benjamin Disraeli, one of the few times the old adventurer got something spot on, when he said, ‘To the liberalism they profess, I prefer the liberties we enjoy, to the Rights of Man, the rights of Englishmen’."@en1
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