Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-01-13-Speech-2-345"
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"en.20040113.15.2-345"2
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".
Madam President, I shall start by commenting on Mrs Kinnock's remark about the need to mobilise similar support for other things as we do for the peace facility. We do not spend similar amounts of money on all the other things: we spend much more. What is new about the peace facility is that we are creating a basis for spending money on things we were never able to spend money on before. Funding the implementation of the peace operations decided by Africa and implemented in an African context is a new thing. We should make sure that we only use that money for things that cannot be funded through the regular systems already in place.
I liked Mr Corrie's remark about oil-rich African states which could do more. We should come back to this. I also see that it would be very meaningful in the Joint Parliamentary Assembly to discuss the performance of oil-exporting economies and other similar extraction industries in Africa. This discussion is just starting up, but that is in many cases where the big money should be found for social purposes.
The fantastic things about NEPAD were its timing and character, and the ambition of accepting exposure and measurement as regards the global criteria relating to democracy. These African countries are saying that they want to be judged on these same principles, echoing what we had all agreed on in the Cotonou framework. They wanted this to be taken up. They did it up against the G8, which attracted much attention globally and, in that sense, raised the stakes in the process of democratisation in Africa.
NEPAD, and democracy in Africa, are still very new. The best performers have had only two – at the most three – reasonably fair elections. We tend to forget that: the best performers have experienced two acceptable democratic elections. There is not much more than a big handful of those best cases. However, things are moving in the right direction.
This peer review is a fantastic, very daring endeavour. Of course they had to institutionalise. It was a wise move to set it into the context of African Union as soon as possible, because, as Mr Van Orden correctly pointed out, what would they have done with Zimbabwe and a large number of other cases if the original five heroes of NEPAD had handled that? They would have run out of political authority. It would have been perceived as a kind of ganging-up – showing the others how to do things. Instead, it was wisely embedded – if I may use that word with reference to that continent – into the African Union, which took it up.
This work is continuing. It is quite fantastic that they are lining up standards to get through this screening in the peer review process. I told them in one discussion that it looks as if it is more difficult to get good marks in the peer review process than it is to fulfil the criteria we have defined in order to become a member of the European Union. It is very ambitious. I can only recommend that everybody interested in Africa studies how they are setting the mark there. I have warned them that it may be too ambitious, but they want this to be a global standard for governance. They know it is not going to be easy.
Institutionally, we look forward very much to a systematic, close, well-organised collaboration with the emerging Commission in Addis Ababa. I hope that we will get back on track and be able to manage the difficulties – also with reference to Zimbabwe. I hope that 2004 will be a positive turning-point, enabling us at full speed to resume the EU-Africa dialogue."@en1
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