Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-02-12-Speech-3-220"
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"en.20030212.7.3-220"2
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"Mr President, as we are all aware, dormant explosive devices, landmines and cluster bombs are among the weapons that can cause especially cruel injuries and mutilations. Those of us who have been to countries in conflict will know the mutilations and wounds with which one is confronted there. I myself became familiar with these sights in Central America.
Parliament has, in various resolutions, insisted on the implementation of the 1997 Ottawa Convention, which banned the use of landmines. It is with reference to this that I want to praise the Commission for the excellent work it has done, not only in the field of mine clearance, but also in educating people as to why landmines have to be banned. Work is progressing at present on preparations for the next conference on the revision of the Ottawa Convention, which is to be held this September in Bangkok, by which time I very much hope that those European states that have not yet ratified the Ottawa Convention will have made good their omission. I look forward to hearing what the President-in-Office of the Council will have to say in response to this question. I think he might well be about to bring Parliament good news from Greece.
The worldwide campaign against landmines has already made great progress. Considerable efforts are currently being made to get belligerent parties other than states to sign up to the Ottawa Convention. This work is being undertaken by a non-governmental organisation – 'Appell de Genève' – and I believe that we can rejoice that such work is being done by non-governmental organisations when state bodies cannot carry it out. In Somalia, for example, 15 organisations and belligerent parties, none of them part of any state apparatus, have signed the Convention.
Another problem of a particularly shattering nature comes in the form of cluster bombs, whose victims include innocent civilians; the injuries these bombs inflict are so horrific and their effects so indiscriminate, that they should be prohibited outright. Previous speakers have described this, and I wish to touch on it only very briefly. You are all familiar with the descriptions of the horrendous injuries resulting from the deployment of cluster bombs. The particularly dreadful thing about it is that the splinters from the cluster bombs that remain in the human body are almost never capable of being removed. Not only are the effects of these bombs indiscriminate in that they can strike civilians as much as soldiers, but they are also imprecise in the area they affect, which amounts to something like 350 football fields every time a cluster bomb is dropped. This makes the precision bombing of military targets impossible, so that there is an increased risk of innocent people being injured. Finally, these bombs also vary in their effect over time, since, if they do not explode, they can remain live for years to come.
It was in December 2001 that Parliament last recalled the 1980 UN agreement on certain conventional weapons and demanded an immediate moratorium on the use of cluster bombs. A moratorium can clearly only be the second best solution until such time as a ban on these inhuman weapons becomes enforceable, but I believe that imposing a moratorium in the first instance is the pragmatic way to go about things. It is here that the European Union could, by its actions, give a very good example."@en1
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