Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-03-16-Speech-4-154"
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"en.20000316.3.4-154"2
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"We have consented to the Haarder report but would like to make the following observations regarding paragraphs 19 and 20 of the draft report.
Paragraph 19 urges Belgium to sign the Convention for national minorities. Flanders does not seek to prevent Belgium from ratifying this Convention for national minorities, but it would like to add the proviso that this should be done outside the Belgian constitutional context. In the Belgian federation, the federal states are equal pursuant to the rules in the constitution. Not one of them constitutes an actual minority. Because the Convention does not clearly define the term “national minority”, according to Flanders, it does not apply to the periphery. For Flanders, “national minority” in such a context can only refer to a minority which has been established within a certain area for centuries, whilst the French-speakers only moved to the periphery some three centuries ago and have since refused to integrate, which is to be expected in the normal course of events (compare this with the Flemish migration to Wallonia and their perfectly integrated descendants). Moreover, French-speakers living in the periphery, which boasts the language facilities, can count on protection, which is mostly unavailable to real minorities.
So, whoever tries to change the situation in the Brussels periphery using this convention will implicitly put the future of the Belgian constitutional equilibrium at risk and illustrate once again that a European lack of insight into our federal system can lead one to think that we would be better off as the separate Member States of Flanders and Wallonia, rather than as a federal Member State of Belgium.
Without a doubt, French-speaking Belgian MEPs will again use this vote to play political games in Belgium. We do not wish to participate in this and would emphatically disassociate ourselves from this kind of practice. Moreover, we regret that in paragraph 5 of the Ludford report, the same text was adopted for racism and xenophobia.
In the same light, Flanders would like to make it clear that the Charter for Regional and Minority Languages, as referred to in paragraph 20 of the Haarder report, does not pertain to French in the periphery but, for example, to the Limburg dialect (recognised in the application of this Charter in the Netherlands) or to the Arel German dialect in the Province of Luxembourg."@en1
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