Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-09-27-Speech-4-012"
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"en.20070927.3.4-012"2
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"Mr President, here in the European Parliament we make laws, but laws alone cannot eliminate racism and xenophobia. The utterances of politicians and other opinion leaders help to foster a climate of hatred and intolerance in which discrimination becomes normal, so that the law remains a dead letter.
I would like really to see the European Commission attacking discrimination in Europe as consistently as it attacks breaches of market rules, for example. We should protect human capital in Europe just as vigorously as financial capital. If we can take on Bill Gates, surely we can take on companies and authorities which discriminate. We know that 14 governments still have not complied with the Racial Equality Directive in one or two respects, but the Commission does not seem in too much of a hurry to enforce the rules and is giving Member States far too much time to come into line. This law should have been implemented years ago; we would not have let Bill Gates get away with it.
And in combating terrorism and crime we must not allow shifting goalposts. Some measures apply only to certain groups and appear to legitimise discrimination. Take, for example, stop-and-search practices, profiling methods, etc., etc. Integration measures can sometimes be discriminatory too and I am pleased to see, for example, that the last government in my own country sought to introduce measures on integration which were subsequently thrown out by the courts, because they were indeed discriminatory.
Of the various amendments, one in particular, Amendment 4, caught my attention. This says that protection of minorities and compliance with anti-discrimination legislation is a matter for the individual Member States. But if there is one thing that is not national, it is our common European values, and so it is very much a European responsibility to ensure equal treatment for every European citizen, because that is the aim of European integration and the market is merely a means to that end.
Lastly, religious freedom is a great
a fundamental right, but it must not be abused to justify discrimination on the basis of ethnicity. For example, a Catholic school must not use religious freedom as a pretext for excluding children of a certain ethnic background, when what it really wants is to keep the school white. And on the other hand, it is not automatically racist to criticise Islam.
Lastly, Mr President, laws are important and it is extremely good that we have this law, but we are all keen to maintain a climate in which discrimination no longer occurs."@en1
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