Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-12-01-Speech-3-063"
| Predicate | Value (sorted: default) |
|---|---|
| rdf:type | |
| dcterms:Date | |
| dcterms:Is Part Of | |
| dcterms:Language | |
| lpv:document identification number |
"en.20041201.10.3-063"2
|
| lpv:hasSubsequent | |
| lpv:speaker | |
| lpv:translated text |
".
Mr President, at my hearings, I expressed the hope that Europe would increasingly speak with one voice, and I am very glad to find us going in that direction the first time I address this House. Rarely can there have been such agreement between the Council, the Commission and Parliament, and I hope that is something we can achieve more often. My hope is that, if we speak with one voice, this will also really result in positive action of the kind we have just described and that I do not need to repeat now.
I did of course listen carefully to your observations, some of which were rather critical, and I would like to consider some of them. Firstly, many of you said that the European Commission or the European Union itself had shown too much of a hands-off attitude when it came, for example, to the observation of elections. To that I would like to say that I was myself President of the OSCE in 2000; we have a major organisation in Europe, which puts a great deal of effort into observing elections. On the ground, there is also ODIHR, which is a very important institution, and I believe that the OSCE should work together with ODIHR and the European Union on a basis of complementarity. In this case, though, it was the OSCE that made these elections its own particular concern.
Nevertheless, I will readily respond to your appeals and have already done some preparatory research. We are more than willing to get involved; we will see how much we can do, and, as I have said, my rapid reaction mechanism contains a number of things, similar to those we used in Georgia, that I can now tell you about. There is a whole range of things that we have been doing for two years already, including projects in support of training, for example the training of local election observers, along with projects for the information of voters and for training the members of local electoral commissions and journalists, and projects relating to the reporting of elections or helping to reform legislation on elections and the media. As you can see, we have been far from inactive, but I do believe that the various institutions in which we all work should complement each other in the work they do.
My second point is that it has been said time and time again that Europe did not go far enough and that we too bore some responsibility for Ukraine’s present situation. That is something I really must repudiate. In my former capacity as Austria’s foreign minister, I sought out very close contacts with Ukraine, and I can tell you that the European Union’s partnership and cooperation agreement, which was negotiated above all by the Commission, has, unfortunately, been insufficiently implemented. Over and over again, I really did go to a lot of trouble about this and told people that they had to do something themselves. I believe that the time has now come to put this neighbourhood policy really centre stage in my policy, and that is what I intend to do; it goes without saying that what we do about the action plans in the immediate future depends on how Ukraine itself now reacts. My plan is to put these things on the table provided that we can really make speed about tackling them.
One of you said that Europe shares a single soul and that shared soul is also present in Ukraine. Let us all be inspired by that to join together in giving this shared soul wings!"@en1
|
| lpv:unclassifiedMetadata |
Named graphs describing this resource:
The resource appears as object in 2 triples