Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-01-18-Speech-4-132"

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". Mr President, what we have just seen is an attempt to wreck the Thursday sitting just as Friday's sitting as been done away with, partly by undermining these topical and urgent debates. However, I would like to say that the subject of Cambodia very much demonstrates the importance of our topical and urgent debates. As Mr Tannock has quite rightly said, the genocide which took place in Cambodia was often hushed up during the 1980s. No one cared about Cambodia. It was this House which, following its first direct election in 1979, was the first to give repressed peoples a moral voice, although it had virtually no powers at that time. And this House took a very special interest in the fate of the people of Cambodia. I recall that in the 1980s our colleague Otto von Habsburg, who I was working with at the time, regularly got the subject of Cambodia onto the agenda. And if the Cambodians wanted to communicate with the peoples of Europe, they did it through the European Parliament's debates on topical and urgent subjects of major importance, here in Strasbourg. A politician who recently died, Son San, a Democrat who trod the difficult path between the Khmer Rouge on the one hand and the pro-Vietnamese puppet regime on the other, gradually pushed ahead the re-establishment of a democratic Cambodia, chiefly with the help of the European Union and of the European Parliament. Today we have an opportunity to build on this, and I am very pleased that the horrifying genocide committed by the Khmer Rouge will now be properly punished. But it is also very positive – and I would like to say that Mrs Iivari is quite right here – that we as the European Union have a chance to actively support democracy, the rule of law and plurality in modern Cambodia. However, this example should make us aware that it is not always a question of absolute power or authority. This House, thank goodness, now has greater powers as regards external policy than it had 20 years ago. It is a question of giving those who are deprived of their rights a moral voice and that is one of the primary duties of this House."@en1

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