Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2010-12-15-Speech-3-262"
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"en.20101215.23.3-262"2
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"Mr President, in an appendix to
George Orwell wrote a chapter on ‘newspeak’ and he talked about how language could be vitiated and changed, and thereby change our thought. The example he gave was the word ‘free’. He could only envisage the word ‘free’ being used in newspeak to mean this dog is free from lice, this field is free from weeds; so the concept of intellectual or political freedom disappeared, because there were no words to express it. It was an uncannily prescient example, because that is more or less what has happened to the word free in our lifetime.
It used to mean a freedom against state coercion: freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of worship; it now means an entitlement. I have a freedom to work; I have a freedom to use the national healthcare system or whatever. This report on human rights has moved from the concept of rights as a guarantee of personal liberty to a right as a claim on everybody else. Instead of guaranteeing our rights to be treated equally, it asserts our rights to be treated differently. There is not a crisis of human rights in Europe, there is crisis of democracy; and we do not tackle that crisis by shifting power from elected representatives to unelected jurists."@en1
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