Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-02-04-Speech-1-061"
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"en.20020204.5.1-061"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I am now speaking on the Ludford report, the primary purpose of which is to create better conditions for people legally resident here, over a long period of time, through according them more rights. That, for a start, is the right approach. The problem, though, is that the third-country nationals within the EU constitute a sort of third class of citizens, ranking below the citizens of the country they live in and then after the citizens of the other EU countries, who are in second place. The report enshrines this distinction in law and thus justifies the fact that discrimination will never be permanently absent. For those who really want to ensure equal rights for all, must also assimilate these differences.
There is, though, a second point which I see as even more important, and, again, it is about enhancing the rights of long-term residents in the EU. Only a specific element among them is addressed here, namely those with legal resident status. It thus excludes all those living here illegally. One could say, ‘OK, the illegals just do not feature in the report and so we are not going to say anything about them today’, but that is precisely the problem: we are always dealing exclusively with people with legal resident status, and almost all the other projected legislation – even own-initiative reports – has seen the failure, over and over again, of amendments intended precisely to enhance the rights of the illegals. The inevitable conclusion is that the illegals are simply the logical consequence of the ‘fortress EU’ policy, and that is why I entertain no high hopes of major changes on this point from within Parliament, the Commission or the Council in the immediate future. Let us then be honest enough to say that we are interested only in those who have the great good fortune to be able to enter the EU at all – under very degrading conditions and often illegally – who then play the joker and get asylum from whatever EU country it happens to be, or who simply happen to be people the capitalist system can make use of. There is to be no improvement in the law for all the people who fall through this particular grating."@en1
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