Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-04-11-Speech-2-090"
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"en.20000411.4.2-090"2
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"The twenty-first century is the century of communications. Paradoxically, it has become more usual to contact friends or colleagues on the other side of the world than to chat with one’s next-door neighbours. Within the vast Internet market there are some people who have found ways to make easy money from exploiting human poverty. Amoral producers and distributors of material have decided to respond to the deviant urges of some individuals by disseminating pornographic documents involving children over the Internet.
No one gets upset at finding large numbers of prostitutes in the streets around this building or at seeing them on display in the windows of Brussels, no one protests when newsagents sell, albeit on the top shelves, magazines flaunting the worst deviations, including paedophilia. And yet this House is indignant today at child pornography as if it were not all part of the continuum. Once again this damage is caused by permissiveness, which, while it may satisfy the mania of some, remains a source of unhappiness for many others. The police and judicial authorities of our respective States must therefore receive adequate resources to combat this plague which affects the most vulnerable of us. In this area which is cross-border in nature, it may be useful for the European Union to make its own contribution.
While the combat must involve international cooperation, however, it is also essential to fight on a day-to-day basis by preventing all these practices becoming commonplace. Some people will retort, as they often do, that it has always existed and will always exist. What a fatalistic comment, and what resignation, what contempt for the human condition! I am delighted to see that our institutions are today becoming aware of the tragic fate experienced by thousands of children throughout the world, including our own countries, and are deciding to find a solution to it.
I am however afraid that the usual double standards may make these measures meaningless, for how credible are policies which would restrict the fight for human dignity to some parties and leave out others? Obviously we need to offer children special protection, but in a society which has lost its points of reference, whatever they may be, and which leaves life’s victims by the wayside in the name of individual freedom, it is our duty to fight to ensure that everyone, man, woman and child, is enabled to live in dignity.
I hope, without too much confidence, that the day will come when our main concern will once again be for the public good, responding to the highest aspirations rather than to the lowest temptations."@en1
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