Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-10-28-Speech-4-140"
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"en.20041028.11.4-140"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, today war is becoming a way of governing the world. A fervent appeal to the rules of international law is the way to find refuge from barbarity and the law of the jungle.
The appeal contained in the joint resolution, which we will vote on today, brings in this line of defence and calls for a moratorium as well as an undertaking to abolish the use, production, storage and exporting of cluster munitions. These munitions pose a danger to the civilian population. Women, children, the old, men, whom I have seen with lacerated flesh and amputated limbs – in Kabul, in Kandahar, in Pristina – in the clinics where they are trying to save what can be saved. This is barbarity, since these mines are used by our democratic countries.
US aircraft dropped thousands of cluster bombs on Afghanistan and Iraq. On the outskirts of Kabul I saw those yellow objects that attract children and are the same colour as food rations, which always used to arrive in the villages from the sky.
There are at least 57 countries holding stocks of cluster munitions, 22 of which are in Europe. There is no doubt that this is in breach of international law. We have to ensure that the safeguarding of human rights prevails over military interests: the right to life for millions of people. This is a goal which we have to set ourselves. For the European Parliament this has to be a commitment, as was the case for the ratification of the Ottawa Mine Ban Treaty, thanks to the unceasing work of thousands of people in non-governmental organisations.
In Europe, we still have to convince Poland, Finland and Latvia to sign up to it. We must also negotiate a new protocol to the convention on conventional weapons and, at the conference to review the Ottawa Treaty, encourage a consensus among states to ban anti-tank mines with sensitive fuses, which explode on human contact. A resolution is not enough; we cannot stop there, and that is why we have also asked for permanent monitoring by the European Parliament."@en1
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