Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-03-15-Speech-3-011"
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"en.20000315.1.3-011"2
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"Mr President, 12 August 1949 is a day which the ancient Romans would have said should be marked with a red stone. It signified a great step forward for mankind – and yet in the fifty years since, although our own half-continent has lived in peace, more people have died in armed conflict than died in the whole of World War II.
We have failed to spread the lessons and values learned from that conflict. Too often our own Member States have been parties to conflict, either through the production and sales of weapons, through the production and distribution of landmines or through the temptation – in the words of a great Victorian statesman in my country – to prefer their wars to be fought at a distance and wherever possible in the name of God. We have failed to educate against the glorification of combat in our own communities. We have failed to educate against the problems and the scourge of racism and xenophobia.
Yet, thanks to global communications, we have a constant reminder now on our television screens of the terrible effects of man's inhumanity to man, and of course to woman and child. We have seen recently in the former Yugoslavia, and now in Chechnya, the terrible effects of armed conflict and we see, furthermore, the effect of governments' efforts to suppress independent media comment on such conflicts, and the development towards totalitarian government.
If the European Union is to become a community of values – if we are to play a true role in the new global governance, then we need to be promoting the values of the Geneva Conventions not only to our own soldiers and security forces, but also to people in our civilian societies. We need to be pushing for the creation of a permanent international criminal court and urging our own Member States to sign and ratify the Convention. We need to be working hard to combat racism and xenophobia.
Liberal Democrats in this House are proud that three of the authors of today's reports, Mrs Malmström, Mrs Haarder and Baroness Ludford have grappled with these issues and given the House these reports today. We live in hope that the twentieth century, which Europe has soaked in blood, can give way to a twenty-first century in which the power, the genius and the enthusiasm of humankind can be applied to the construction of a more just, peaceful and sustainable world."@en1
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"chairman of the Committee on Citizen’s Freedoms and Rights, Justice and Home Affairs."1
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