Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-04-25-Speech-3-249"
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"en.20070425.35.3-249"2
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". – Thank you, Madam President, President-in-Office, and Commissioner. I am honoured to have this opportunity to present as rapporteur the European Parliament’s 2006 Annual Report on Human Rights.
I was very happy to refer in the report to the need for a clear and efficient common arms export control policy, including within the European Union, as the impact that the trade in small arms, in particular, is having on human rights conflicts in various parts of the world is clear. We need to move clearly towards an international arms trade treaty, as has been called for repeatedly by Parliament.
May I conclude by thanking all of the other groups for working with me on this. This is not a PPE-DE resolution on human rights. It is, I hope, reflective of Parliament as a whole and of all the groups in Parliament. I wish to thank everybody who has worked on it with me.
This report is the most comprehensive and important political statement that the European Parliament makes each year on the issue of human rights and their promotion. As rapporteur I have maintained the direct assessment style adopted last year for the 2005 report. In essence it is a constructive and critical analysis of the performance of the Council, the Commission and Parliament in promoting and defending human rights across the globe. The report is the culmination of five months of work in the European Parliament’s Sub-Committee on Human Rights and Committee on Foreign Affairs in which, it should be noted, significant consensus was reached through discussion, debate and compromise amendments.
One of the focal points of the report concerns the EU’s role in the new UN Human Rights Council. The assertions made are based on the Parliament’s attendance at a number of those Council meetings in Geneva. The Council and Commission’s recent annual report could not refer to the UN HRC so I felt that it was appropriate that we should focus on it in the report and in the debate today.
Our report recognises that while it has the potential to develop into a valuable framework for the EU multilateral human rights effort, for the first 12 months the UN Human Rights Council has not been a good news story. The UN Human Rights Council has failed to reach consensus and an acceptable compromise on key issues such as the Middle East, Darfur, Burma and many others. Instead, it has been used at times as a political point-scoring chamber and we must find ways of preventing it being used as a political forum for conflict between geographical or ideological blocks of countries.
A good example of this is the weakness of the Council’s resolution on Darfur. Surely the cessation of the spread of violence and the protection of innocent people in Darfur should have been the only priority of a UN structure designed to deal with human rights, but unfortunately that was not the case. Debates on Darfur and trying to get agreement on Darfur were used as a political bargaining chip or as a lever to try and get agreement on other resolutions. I would urge the European Council, in this regard, to look into introducing tougher measures to respond to the humanitarian crisis in Darfur. This is an issue I raised yesterday, in a committee meeting, with the Council representative who is with us today.
The heart of the report deals with how the EU is performing in relation to the human rights guidelines that it sets for itself. There are five EU policy guidelines that Europe must promote. These deal with the death penalty, torture, children and women in armed conflict situations, human rights defenders and, of course, dialogues with third countries. I felt it important to critically analyse the Council’s performance, especially in relation to the implementation of those guidelines, as it has committed specifically to these tools for human rights advocacy in third countries. In particular, the Council and Commission need to promote the guidelines within EU embassies and missions abroad. Concerns remain that some delegations have little or no knowledge of the guidelines themselves, or of how best to promote them within third-country situations.
The report also calls for more consultation between the Council and the European Parliament, and the Sub-Committee on Human Rights in particular, in relation to the Council and Commission’s Human Rights report, so that we can genuinely move towards a situation of one all-encompassing report with the views of Parliament, Council and Commission. That is what we are trying to do by changing the structure of our report.
The report also emphasises the need to strengthen and improve EU-China human rights dialogue considerably. It recognises that China has decided to have all death penalty cases reviewed by the Supreme Court, which shows it is inching forward on the death penalty, but also recognises that China puts more people to death than any other country.
The report also welcomes resolutions passed by the Parliament calling for the closure of the Guantánamo Bay Detention Centre, and the contributions that Parliament has made to raising the profile of human rights concerns regarding that Centre. The very existence of Guantánamo Bay continues to send out a negative signal as to how the fight against terrorism is being pursued by the West, led by the US."@en1
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