Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-11-20-Speech-4-104"
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"en.20031120.4.4-104"2
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".
The issue here is the revival of the Euro-Mediterranean partnership. The people who live around the Mediterranean have needed no vote by a European Parliament to establish relations among each other, as they have done since time immemorial. For thousands of years, the Mediterranean has not been an obstacle, but a link between peoples.
It is significant, however, that in this, the twenty-first century, where the means exist whereby humanity may form one united and fraternal community, society is going backwards. Now that the Mediterranean is no longer a physical obstacle as such, thanks to modern transport facilities, it is being surrounded by legal and material barbed wire. Those who live in the southern Mediterranean, in Morocco, governed by ‘our friend, the King’, in Algeria, governed by the dual dictatorship of the military and Islamic fundamentalists, in Tunisia, which only French diplomats consider to be democratic, find it increasingly difficult simply to come to France despite the fact that there are a thousand links between these peoples of the southern and northern Mediterranean.
Therefore, if we want to talk about a ‘Euro-Mediterranean partnership’, the least we can do is to allow those from the Maghreb who live in France to live there with dignity, as human beings in the twenty-first century, whether they are there legally or illegally. They should be granted all civil rights, in particular the right to vote and the right to move freely throughout the European Union.
Rather than opening the borders between EU countries slightly only to close them even tighter on the outside, Europe must be an open Europe that shares its resources with the peoples of these countries, which it pillaged, colonised and exploited for so long."@en1
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