Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-07-04-Speech-3-185"
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"en.20010704.5.3-185"2
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"Mr President, let me say – and I am certainly not laying any blame on Mr Wuori here – that it is rather surrealistic to combine human rights and fundamental rights in the same joint debate. In fact, we are entirely responsible for fundamental rights in Europe, while we can only take a humble approach to human rights in the world, knowing how little influence we can exert there. Yet there is perhaps an intermediate area: in the candidate countries we can look at human rights and fundamental rights as a whole in view of their forthcoming accession to the European Union.
Let me point out here that the Committee on Citizens’ Freedoms has very few resources for these activities. The Committee on Foreign Affairs, Human Rights, Common Security and Defence Policy has nine individuals and one administrative unit for this purpose. This is not the case of the Committee on Citizens’ Freedoms and you will find that the resolution calls for the necessary resources to enable us to do our work properly.
While taking this opportunity to thank everyone who helped draw up this report, let me also say that we call for a network of jurists. I think it is important to be able to consult a network of national jurists to support the team of rapporteurs and help collect information. Lastly, we want to work with the other Parliamentary committees, for given that the Charter also focuses on environmental rights and economic and social rights, the committees responsible for these areas must of course also have a say on the way the Charter is applied in the European Union.
The philosophy underlying this report is the refusal to brand this or that state, to draw attention to this or that blunder. Quite the contrary. In any case, the rapporteur believes that the "zero defect" idea is utopian when it comes to human rights. Instead, human rights and fundamental rights in Europe mean that when a mistake is discovered, we can complain, condemn the perpetrator, hold an administrative inquiry and take regulatory or legislative decisions to prevent its recurrence. That is the kind of respect for human rights to which we can rightly aspire.
Lastly, this report is in two parts, as required by the rules. First there is the resolution, which has been amended as a result of the discussions in the Committee on Citizens’ Freedoms and the plenary Assembly; then there is the explanatory statement. I just want to say that no country has been spared and those who take the trouble to read this report will find that both the explanatory statement and the resolution put forward proposals to resolve the matter in the spirit to which I referred a moment ago.
In fact, this first report is intended as a rough draft, the matrix of a new method. If the plenary accepts the rapporteur’s proposals and the report adopted in committee, we will be able to work in a much more collective manner, based on cooperation within and outside the European Parliament, on a dialogue with the NGOs, a dialogue with the national parliaments, which are our natural partners. We will have a report that is detailed, checked by an entire committee and which, I believe, will be awaited, and perhaps feared, by public opinion. At any rate, that is my hope.
I would like to explain the new title of this report and why the Committee on Citizens’ Freedoms and Rights, Justice and Home Affairs endorsed the method adopted for this year’s report. Our report is now called a report on fundamental rights rather than a report on human rights. We deliberately chose to take a broader and more neutral approach.
This new method is based on the European Union’s Charter of Fundamental Rights, which offers a fresh perspective by introducing a new and innovative element into political life; it is up to Parliament to breathe life into this Charter. So it was only natural for Parliament’s responsible committee to take the Charter we adopted in the House as its starting point for this report. We agreed that since there was to be an annual report, it had to be a report and it had to be annual.
Let me explain myself. A report looks at facts, so we had to analyse verifiable facts. And the report had to be annual, because it is interesting to compare what happened from one year to another and to check the year after what happened to Parliament’s resolutions of the year before.
So why choose the Charter of Fundamental Rights? I think we had to do so. This is in fact an eminently European document since it came out of the Convention, i.e. it was the combined effort of the three legitimate bodies that made up the Convention. In any case, this Convention has been quoted as an example that can point the way forward for other European texts. The Charter is a complete text because, for the first time ever, it includes civil and political rights but also economic and social rights and, therefore, covers a broad sweep of fundamental rights. Lastly, it is a reference document. Whatever the outcome of the debate on its inclusion or not in the Treaties, it has already become a reference document since the European Court of Justice draws on it and the Commission itself has undertaken to have the activities of its services screened for compatibility with the Charter.
And, as I said earlier, it is a reference document, for the candidate countries because the Union could not accept a country that did not respect the values upheld by the European Charter on Human Rights with regard to its own inhabitants.
I also agree with Mr Wuori that our credibility is at stake here. We can only criticise others if we have the political courage to do the same to ourselves. This report offers us a means of doing so.
Turning now to the working method, let me remind you that the Charter of Fundamental Rights sets out a minimum number of rights to which every citizen of the Union is entitled. So we looked at the 50 articles of this Charter and checked whether they were applied in the 15 Member States and at Union level. The report is planned in the same way as the Charter; the resolution repeats the chapter headings of the Charter, as does the explanatory statement.
We have drawn on a wide variety of different sources: the Council of Europe, of course, and the activities of its committees, the national parliaments, the NGOs, civil society, the Vienna observatory, a network of jurists. In fact we have used every source we could find, feeling we should not disregard any important or reliable source available to us."@en1
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