Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-04-08-Speech-1-110"
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"en.20020408.8.1-110"2
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"Mr President, I would like to congratulate Mr Oostlander and Mr von Boetticher for their reports. I will concentrate my remarks on the Oostlander report and the ARGO system. We recognise that a common approach to immigration, to the question of visas and asylum and our external borders is essential. I do not believe the European Union is functioning properly if we do not have such a common approach. We are moving towards this, and we need to have a realistic and modern interpretation that recognises the situation in Europe and the rest of the world as it is, not one that pretends the situation is different or imagines it as we would like it to be.
I want to address Amendments Nos 41 and 42 to which Mr Oostlander referred and over which he and I have had discussions because these are very important. I am grateful to Mr Schmidt and Baroness Ludford of the Liberal group for tabling Amendment No 42 because this was the subject of a heated exchange in our committee and it was owing to a slight administrative difficulty that it fell one vote short of being passed in committee. The challenge of No 42, by comparison with No 41, was that Amendment No 42 talks about offering asylum and protection to people who are escaping from State and non-State persecution. It is the non-State persecution to which we must address our attention.
We can all think of countries where we do not like the regime and where people are escaping from being harassed, persecuted and attacked by the State, but here, however, we must consider the cases in which these people are escaping from non-State organisations or bodies.
I have given examples before about Afghanistan where the Taliban were not recognised as a State. If we did not include this, we would not have been accepting persecution by the Taliban as a reasonable reason for offering asylum to people. Then there are other countries around the World, Somalia for example – about which I am not an expert – where it is difficult to understand what is the State and what is not the State. There are also people fleeing from war-torn countries who need protection. We could have a long list of those countries.
So, there are many countries which are divided by forces of one faction or another, some State and some non-State. It may only be a few, but my group believes we should offer protection to them: that is why we will be supporting Amendment No 42, and I think that it should be voted on before Amendment No 41 because it is stronger and moves in a different direction. If, in Amendment No 41, the words 'and current practice' were to be removed, we would not have quite so much of a problem with supporting it because it says 'in accordance with the Geneva Convention' and there are few people in this Chamber who would be opposed to anything to do with the Geneva Convention, which we support.
Just a few words on enlargement. This poses a real challenge. We have to sort out the whole question of asylum, visas and immigration before enlargement takes place but we must not then use the question of enlargement to expect the applicant countries to have higher standards than we ourselves are adopting. Many applicant countries are doing very well and their economies and standards of living are approaching those of EU countries. Enlargement is not about building a new, more powerful, stronger external frontier. If we have a very successful European Union, we must not allow that to create a further division between us and the countries which will then be outside a new, enlarged Union of 25 or 27 States. It is about sharing responsibility, about making certain that people have opportunities and rights, and we will be supporting that."@en1
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