Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-09-04-Speech-3-141"
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"en.20020904.5.3-141"2
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"Madam President, President-in-Office of the Council, Commissioner, rapporteur, ladies and gentlemen, I agree with the President-in-Office of the Council: this is a good report. However, as he is quite aware, it is very often the case that Parliament produces good resolutions but there is a problem afterwards, and that problem is the Council. Mr Messner is clearly right: there is an institutional problem, but that is not all, There is the problem of the Commission too.
Mr Belder was right to remind us of the need for the strategy. I cannot believe that, even today, we are unable to distinguish between democratic Asian countries and non-democratic Asian countries. We lump them all together with China, with which we have been pursuing a difficult dialogue, not just since yesterday but for a decade now, a difficult dialogue in which we are repeatedly informed by the Chinese leaders that China is a specific case, that there is a specific Asian approach to
human rights. Have you never thought to tell them that Engels, Marx, Stalin and Lenin were not exactly Asian and that they must stop talking such rubbish?
The problem is not economic, President-in-Office, and our Taiwanese friends are the best illustration of this, for, quite apart from any political or institutional relationship with our countries, they have become a country with 20 million inhabitants which is the European Union’s third largest trading partner.
The businessmen of Taiwan and the European Union have found their own way. It is we who have a problem, and the problem is that a number of countries are at war: in Vietnam, there is currently a Vietnam war against democracy and freedom, there is currently a war being waged in China against democracy and freedom, there is currently a war being waged in Laos against democracy and freedom. This problem cannot be addressed here. Mr Ford has condemned the initiatives of Mr Jarzembowski and other Members in support of democracy in Taiwan. All this seems to me to be completely incredible.
I fail to understand this cooperation policy, Commissioner Patten. I fail to understand why we should continue to give money that we know full well will end up in the wallets of the Vietnamese, Chinese and Laotian leaders and have no impact at all. Why, Commissioner, do you not do what you are starting to do with other countries? To do away with all these cooperation projects and give countries EUR 1 million once they have completed this specific democratisation reform. This would eliminate all the European bureaucracy and, therefore, fraud as well, all the disgraceful wastage of our and taxpayers’ money.
I would also like the Council and the Commission to inform us whether there really is no hope of succeeding in obtaining the release of five ‘disappeared persons’
Twenty years ago, hundreds of thousands of Europeans marched down the streets calling for the release of the Chilean disappeared
We are incapable of saving five missing civilians, five ‘disappeared persons’
in Laos, a country of 5 million inhabitants of minor geopolitical influence. We are not even capable of obtaining the release of the leaders of the Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam, who have been in prison for 20 years now. I find all this absolutely unacceptable, not to say incomprehensible."@en1
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