Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-01-13-Speech-4-153"
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"en.20050113.11.4-153"2
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"Mr President, hardly any country has suffered as much as Cambodia over the past 60 to 70 years: first there was the Second World War, which raged there with the same brutality as elsewhere; then came the two wars in Indo-China, the Khmer Rouge with their stone age communism, and the Communism imposed by the Vietnamese, who claimed to come as liberators, while, today, the state is falling apart and there is organised crime on an unimaginable scale.
Nevertheless, it has rightly been said that none of this can be a reason to tolerate or accept what is currently happening there, and before our very eyes. What we see going on is a particularly unpleasant form of contemporary – I refuse to call it modern – slavery, in the shape of the sexual exploitation of this country’s women and underaged children. It is, of course, in the first instance, organised crime in Cambodia that bears responsibility for this to a massive degree, but that responsibility is shared by two other bodies, and so I see items 12 and 13 of our resolution as very important.
There is, on the one hand, the Cambodian Government itself, which must, at long last, ratify and implement the relevant UN Convention and the relevant agreement on the combating, firstly of trafficking in human beings, and secondly of organised crime. It is we, though, in the European Union, who share responsibility to an equal degree. This trade in slaves could not exist in the absence of a market for them; the demand for them comes not exclusively or principally from Asia, but, to a massive degree and not least, from Europe. For that reason, our responsibility is not only to use our foreign policy, security policy and development policy as a means to the end of doing away with this form of slavery; we must also be unrelenting in using all the means with which we, in Europe, combat cross-border crime and fight for our internal security, to hunt down the operators and organisers of this sort of sex tourism, for if we do not, we will have not the least right to point the finger at others. We must start by discharging our own responsibilities in Europe and then press home the point to our Cambodian partners that this is a fundamental human rights issue and one on which we will yield not an inch, and we must be willing not only to give them massive support in building up their justice system, but also, within the EU, to clean our own house."@en1
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