Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-02-10-Speech-1-070"
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"en.20030210.7.1-070"2
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"Mr President, the fact that I was in Porto Alegre and not in Davos is not the only reason why I feel that, of the two fora held at the end of January, the Porto Alegre Forum was certainly the most important. It outlined a range of constructive proposals for world policies on the environment, peace and freedom of expression and combating hunger and disease. It is particularly important that the European Parliament should take into consideration what was said at the Forum regarding the forthcoming World Trade Organisation meeting in Cancún. We know that an agreement on services is planned, but we do not yet know which services will be covered by the agreement and made subject to the rules of free international trade. The Forum and, I believe, Parliament’s concern is the possibility that the services to be liberalised might include certain essential social services such as education or health and certain essential public commodities such as water. Any subjection of such services to market rules would be a breach of the fundamental rights enshrined in the Nice Charter and other formal international treaties. The Commission must give Parliament prior notice of the list which it intends to propose and uphold in Cancún, so that it can assess it and express the views of the European citizens on these extremely sensitive issues.
The Forum also recognised and welcomed enthusiastically the possibility that the European Union should become a model for other structures of supranational and regional democratic governance, first and foremost as a means of limiting conflict and establishing peace. From this particular perspective, it is no coincidence that the Porto Alegre Forum was held in Brazil and that President Lula da Silva has now intervened. Indeed, not only can the European Union become the model for a similar political initiative in Latin America, but its very existence and independent international structure will benefit from a decisive boost in a world in which, thanks, not least, to President Lula da Silva and Latin America, multipolarity is developing, although that multipolarity is currently under great threat from the intention of the United States and some of its most faithful allies to declare war on Iraq unilaterally."@en1
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