Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-10-28-Speech-4-139"
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"en.20041028.11.4-139"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to speak for two minutes in support of an important cause. This cause is essential, I believe, in promoting a culture that can help to prevent and resolve the problems that man brings upon himself in an endless succession of suffering, injuries and deaths, which all too often affect the civilian population and which are caused by the laying of landmines in many countries. Mines are deadly weapons of war that we must oppose at all costs, since they are directed against the civilian population, remain active indefinitely and often make it impossible to implement effective mine-clearing operations.
We know that the international community has taken action on these issues. Non-governmental organisations have mounted a major campaign, backed by a collection of signatures, and have launched a spontaneous movement which has led the governments of many countries to sign the Ottawa Treaty. This is a major international treaty which has banned anti-personnel mines.
Today we must move on from that treaty, we must encourage a swell of opinion and then, I hope, action by governments who can draw up further conventions, legal instruments and protocols with a view to banning other types of mine. I am referring to cluster munitions, extremely deadly mines whose devastating effect is many times greater than that of anti-personnel mines.
Anyone who has had the chance to see the exhibits on display in some museum of horror, if I can use that turn of phrase, cannot help but feel indignation and a strong impulse to take action on this issue. We have recently been to Slovenia, and were able to see in a museum the effects of this kind of mine.
We saw photos, pictures of fields, pictures of wounded people. We met people who bear in their flesh the effects of these weapons, which the international community must ban. They are not traditional tools of war, precisely because they are not confined to the battlefields and will strike civilian populations, women and children. They strike the children who play in the fields, the women who go into the cultivated fields to gather their food, where instead they encounter death.
I hope that this Parliament will undertake to broaden the existing convention to include this other type of deadly weapon."@en1
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