Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-02-16-Speech-3-084"
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"en.20000216.7.3-084"2
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"We welcome the fact that the European Parliament is continuing its initiatives to fight discrimination and inequality, and the four areas included in the EQUAL programme – employability, entrepreneurship, adaptability and equal opportunities for men and women – would appear to be genuinely relevant.
However, this report, although probably inspired by the best intentions, occasionally takes a direction which I feel is highly dangerous in that it tends to erase notions of citizenship and legality and turns a multiplicity of exceptions into the common law on which the Community approach is based.
Even if one cannot but applaud the decision to adopt specific measures to eradicate all forms of discrimination on the labour market, which might affect asylum seekers whom life has already, by definition, treated badly, we still need to keep a legal conception of this notion: to put it plainly, where there is every reason to help asylum seekers who follow the correct procedure and are duly recognised as such, the same does not apply to the numerous categories listed in the report, namely applicants, those under temporary protection and those denied refugee status and threatened with repatriation, for whom the report makes provision for identical assistance.
There is a risk that the so-called aid measures provided for in the report will spread insidiously and with disastrous results: asylum seekers, of course, plus asylum seekers under temporary protection while their applications are being processed and asylum seekers whose applications have been rejected and who are threatened with expulsion should all, according to the report, be able to benefit from this set of measures, whereas their very status – after all, what is an asylum seeker who has been refused refugee status and who is threatened with expulsion if not an illegal immigrant – should, at least for the last category, exclude them from a policy to integrate them into a Community which does not acknowledge their presence in its midst as legal or legitimate.
Whether we like it or not, a signal of this sort would be a fearful invitation to immigrants who, merely by applying for refugee status, irrespective of whether or not it is granted, would be able to qualify for a range of aid measures designed to help them integrate permanently into the labour market, in a general climate of shortage, in which the legal population, both foreign and indigenous, is cruelly aware of the problem of unemployment.
Consequently, despite its general approach, which cannot but be endorsed, I am unable to support a report which contains in it the seed of a new attack on the concepts of citizenship and republican legitimacy which I hold so dear."@en1
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