Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-03-13-Speech-2-035"

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"en.20010313.5.2-035"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, not everything that is legal is also legitimate. Not everything that is illegal is also illegitimate. We have spoken a great deal here today about crime. In my opinion, however, it is not a crime to help needy people who wish to enter the EU actually to do so, simply because this is illegal; the crime is the closed-doors policy of the EU. This is acknowledged even by the UNHCR. In a study of those who traffic in human beings, the UNHCR found that the problem lies with the fortress policy of the EU and that the only way to change this situation is to open the borders further, not to introduce measures against the so-called smugglers. There is a second problem that I would like to raise in connection with this report, which wants to call the carriers to account to a greater extent. In Germany this has led to racist behaviour, and has even led the authorities to call upon taxi drivers to behave in a racist manner. They have said that you can tell if someone is illegal or not when he is standing on the German-Polish border and wants you to provide him with transport; taxi drivers themselves have no powers to check these people’s papers. They have been told that these people are easy to recognise! No human being is illegal, and one cannot possibly tell whether or not a human being is in an illegal situation. A final point that has made me very sceptical is that, at the time when there were still two Germanies, the GDR and the FRG, in the 1970s, Germany’s supreme court reached a decision stating that people smuggling was legitimate, in other words exactly what I was talking about, and that it was even legitimate to demand money for this. Commercial assistance to refugees, therefore, which you are more or less criminalising here, was at that time highly commended. This makes me fear that the whole issue is being exploited, that we do not dare to take action against the refugees and those who have been made illegal, and therefore need new victims. This is why you are seeking out those who assist refugees, irrespective of whether or not they are being paid. It is they who need our support so that more people are able to cross the border cheaply."@en1

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