Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-02-26-Speech-4-025"
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"en.20040226.1.4-025"2
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"Mr President, in the aftermath of the profound changes in Europe, relations with Russia have become very complex. Dialogue and cooperation have been enshrined in a plethora of treaties and agreements in many international institutions, and partnership and cooperation agreements make meetings between the EU and Russia at the highest level a regular, and indeed fixed, occurrence.
I increasingly get the impression, though, that this comprehensive dialogue is becoming a fossilised and predictable ritual. I think it was Commissioner Patten who, a few months ago, told the Committee on Foreign Affairs, Human Rights, Common Security and Defence Policy that he had the impression that the speaking notes prepared for him on Russia had not substantially changed for some considerable time. Politics is, of course, always the art of the possible, and that means that one will always have to take an approach to a large country like Russia that differs from the approach one would take if a small country were misbehaving itself. In terms of proportion, one can certainly compare atrocities against civilians in Kosovo and in Chechnya, but it is obvious that our response to Russia will be different – as it indeed is. I would, however, ask the Council, as a matter of urgency, to address the issues that have not been satisfactorily resolved and are still on the agenda rather than dodging them – which is what it is doing, in a sense, by the mere fact of being absent from this debate. There can be no compromise where partnership and cooperation agreements are concerned, nor in relation to their adoption by, and extension to, all the new accession countries; Russia can, for example, take a good look at how customs tariffs change from what they were before, at a time when we had bilateral agreements with some of the candidate countries. Once they are in the EU, customs tariffs will fall. It follows that these countries’ accession to the European Union does not have only detrimental effects.
Many references have been made to Chechnya. There too, I believe, we should not merely allow ourselves the luxury of making appeals or of ignoring it outright. I have always taken the view that we have to find different ways of targeting the funds that we appropriate for cooperation with Russia. We must try to prop up the weak structures of civil society in Russia, in order that this society may undergo democratic change from the bottom up and not in the lamentable way we have seen in recent months."@en1
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