Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-06-03-Speech-2-044"

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"Mr President, Mr Hernández Mollar’s report is full of good intentions and we will no doubt approve it. It also, however, suffers from a most curious naivety. How can we conclude legal agreements – or even discuss the law – with a state, the United States, which has no concept of or respect for the law, for the very notion of the law? How can we contemplate extraditing our nationals to a country, a state, which does not obey the same legal conventions as us, or does so less and less? That is the question asked by this report. For, in the final analysis, we are negotiating with a state which enforces the death penalty, and to which we are thinking of extraditing our nationals; a state which does not respect fundamental human rights, particularly in relation to anti-terrorist legislation; a state which submits ever more cases to its military tribunals, so that we may perhaps see our own nationals judged by a US military tribunal; a state whose personal data transfer legislation is in flagrant contravention of our laws. Ultimately, we might ask ourselves, in view of all this, why we pass laws on these matters, and on many more besides, if we are then to put ourselves into the hands of a state which deliberately breaks those laws. Lastly and most importantly, this state behaves like an ancient tribe, kidnapping our nationals, imprisoning them without even taking the trouble to charge them (I am thinking, of course, of Guantánamo Bay, but I believe there are other examples) and even, in all probability, indulging in a few acts of torture, sadly far from the prying eyes of any journalists. In fact, the state in question does not respect the law, and, in my opinion, we do not have to honour any legal ties, or at any rate judicial or penal ones, with it. I doubt, however, that the European Union will be capable of taking a firm stand, since it has sprung this trap with its own hands and behaves towards the US with a type of passivity which will sooner or later end up by leading us into ruinous situations. I might add that we are seeing the first signs of some examples of this."@en1

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