Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-03-16-Speech-4-112"
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"en.20000316.3.4-112"2
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"The Danish and Swedish Social Democrats have today voted in favour of the report by Mr Andrew Nicholas Duff and Mr Johannes Voggenhuber regarding drawing up a European Union Charter of Fundamental Rights. We are in favour of the drawing up of a Charter of Fundamental Rights in the form of a political document. In this period of reforms of the EU, including its enlargement, it is important to focus upon the fact that the EU’s
is to protect individual citizens. A Charter could make a positive contribution to this. In drawing up a Charter of Fundamental Rights, there is always a certain danger of citizens’ viewing it simply as a meaningless piece of paper, to be waved on state occasions but destined to disappoint. A majority of the European Parliament is therefore calling for the Charter to be of binding effect and to be incorporated into the Treaty, in other words for the agenda of the current Intergovernmental Conference to be extended.
In connection with previous votes on this subject, we have clearly expressed our view that there should be no more issues on the agenda than it will be possible to resolve at the Nice Summit in December. We have already emphasised that no more obstacles should be put in the way of enlargement of the Union. Drawing up a set of binding, fundamental rights would raise a series of very difficult questions of principle, in terms both of the content of these rights and of their relationship to other sets of fundamental rights, for example the European Convention on Human Rights. It is therefore unrealistic to expect the issues to have been resolved by December. For that reason alone, we do not think that fundamental rights should be on the agenda of the current Intergovernmental Conference. We have made this known in the individual votes en route to the report. If we nonetheless choose to vote in favour of the whole report, that is because we believe that fundamental human rights are one of the foundations upon which the EU is built and because we want a Charter concerning these to be drawn up in the form of a political document. Whether it is subsequently to be incorporated into the Treaty in a form that is binding will depend upon an assessment of whether the content of the Charter would provide citizens with better protection than that which they have at present."@en1
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