Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-05-16-Speech-3-155"
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"en.20010516.5.3-155"2
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"Mr President, Mr President-in-Office of the Council, Commissioner, as the Commissioner and President-in-Office have pointed out, we are dealing here not with a country which is far flung from Europe, but with a candidate country with a whole host of serious problems. It has economic problems which people are trying to resolve – and good luck to them – and we in the European Union shall support the reforms. To all intents and purposes, Turkey is still both unwilling and unable to reform the political system – as the president of the republic and the military have both pointed out. Hardly any progress whatsoever has been made on the so-called Kurdish question, i.e. the question of minorities, and the situation in the prisons is horrendous. You would think that a government with so many problems would at least try to resolve the most pressing and urgent problems.
I recently made a short visit to Turkey with Mr Cohn-Bendit. I personally was only there very briefly, but it was time enough to see that this is a dialogue between two people who are either hard of hearing or stone deaf; I refer to the organisers of the hunger strike on the one hand, who should end or at least suspend the hunger strike, and the Turkish government on the other.
If the European Parliament delegation just announced is to make any sense or have any chance of success, then both sides need to be willing to find a compromise or, at the very least, to stop what they are doing. We all know that reform is needed in the Turkish prisons. But the various proposals made – and this is a mild criticism of the work of the Council of Europe and its anti-torture committee – must not lose sight of the underlying problem. Turkey is a country which, because of its laws, still generates a lot of political prisoners; that is the problem. There are not so many political prisoners because there are so many assassination attempts, there are so many political prisoners because the laws in Turkey make political prisoners out of so many people – and that should be the starting point.
Secondly, even where people become prisoners or political prisoners as the result of terrorist activities – which I do not condone but which I cannot deny – solitary confinement must be abolished or at least reduced to what is humanly bearable. The Commissioner announced a series of measures which Turkey intends to implement. I spoke with the Turkish justice minister in January and these issues were already being discussed. But the point with the monitoring system, with Article 16 and with the system of a judge to oversee how sentences are executed in Turkey is, how is all this going to be implemented? The same law can be applied in a humane manner, with due respect for human rights, or it can be applied in a way which tends towards isolation and solitary confinement. I call on Turkey to give us, the European Parliament, and Europe a chance to help it overcome this problem, but Turkey must also show willing."@en1
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