Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-02-14-Speech-3-011"
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"en.20070214.2.3-011"2
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".
Mr President, Mr President-in-Office of the Council, ladies and gentlemen, the song of freedom cannot be played on the instrument of violence; that is a precise summary of what we are talking about here. We are talking about the core values of our European Community, of which we are rightly proud and which we rightly defend in our day-to-day work, in this House, and in this lucid report.
International terrorism is indeed a threat to freedom and must be fought with all the means at our disposal, but this must be done on the basis of our national laws, of the European Convention on Human Rights and of international treaties such as the UN Convention against Torture. That, precisely, has been our concern in doing this work.
This offence against international human rights and against the very foundations of European law must be denounced and punished. What has happened to these people – who include our European fellow-citizens – is not, contrary to what certain members of the committee would have us believe, a trivial offence; no, it is inhumane, it is immoral, and it is unjust. So what actually happened to the people who were abducted, sold, handed over, detained and tortured? Who caused it to be done and who had a hand in it? That is the truth that we had to find out – not the reason why the German citizen Mr El-Masri went to Skopje, from where he was abducted, taken to Kabul and tortured, or why the Turkish citizen Murat Kurnaz, who had been born and had grown up in Bremen, took himself off to Pakistan, whence he was sold, tortured and dragged off to Guantanamo. Neither of these men had been charged with any crime; neither of them had anyone to defend them.
Had they been suspected of committing crimes, this would have been something for the prosecutors and the courts to decide; never before have we arrogated to ourselves this role, but there is no case in which the end justifies the means. What we do know is that CIA agents were involved in the abductions. Prosecutors in Milan and Munich have issued warrants for their arrest, which must now be passed on to the USA. We cannot, and must not, allow a secret service organisation to do as it pleases on our soil, with our governments being unable to defend themselves against it.
We therefore call on the German Presidency of the Council to make it plain, on behalf of all the Member States, that they will not allow illegal practices and violations of human rights on their territory. In fighting wrongdoing of whatever kind, the law must not be broken, for we would thereby be betraying nothing less than that which we have inherited from our founding fathers, the very foundation of our Community. Europe stands for the rule of law, for separation of the powers and democracy; its politicians must take their stand for those things. As Lao Tse said many years ago, one is responsible not only for that which one does, but also for that that one does not do.
What we do about this is also a matter of personal and political morality, and not just of jurisprudence. As I see it, the great achievement of this committee is to move this debate out into the European Union, into society and far beyond our borders. Europe must not become a stop on the road to Guantanamo."@en1
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