Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-01-26-Speech-3-129"
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"en.20050126.8.3-129"2
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".
Mr President, as the honourable Member Mr Schultz has mentioned, a large number of Heads of State, representatives from this Parliament and other parliaments will gather tomorrow in Auschwitz, along with survivors of that hell, to commemorate the liberation of the extermination camp sixty years ago.
As representatives of a new Europe, they are fulfilling the duty to remember and to pass on the message, which is today more necessary than ever. The Presidency thanks the two Members for providing us with a moment of reflection and recollection through this question, here in Parliament, which, in 1979, following its first direct elections, elected an Auschwitz survivor, Mrs Simone Veil, as its President, and I pay tribute to her for her courage as President of this House.
Sixty years – that is less than the life of a human being. This is an opportunity to give a voice to those people, the few survivors, who carry the scars of that incalculable horror, which is unspeakable and yet must be spoken about loudly and clearly today. The Shoah will always remain a break, a fracture, in European history, as you so rightly said. Furthermore, as the former Bundestag President, Mrs Rita Süssmuth, said, the Shoah has no parallel. We appreciate that 20th century history is pockmarked with genocides, but the nature of the Shoah is specific and unique. It is the very negation of our civilisation, of our spiritual and ethical values, the negation of the humanism that Europe created.
Auschwitz does not solely belong to history, a history that is unsustainable. Auschwitz must remain a living, painful reality, which will encourage current and future generations to gain a better understanding, to reject any ideology based on hate and exclusion, and to put the notion of ‘never again’ into practice on a daily basis. The obligation to remember, essential though it may be, is not enough. Of course we need to remind ourselves about what happened, but there must also be commitment and action. Anti-Semitism has not gone away. According to the Vienna monitoring centre, anti-Semitism is in fact on the rise in our societies, along with racism of all kinds.
The revisionists and the deniers, all those who try to water down the unique nature of the Shoah, all those who put forward pretexts in establishing unacceptable links must be combated. This is a crime against the truth, to borrow the phrase coined by President Chirac, and those responsible must be hunted down in a Europe based on ethical values and respect for human rights; a Europe based henceforth on the Charter of Fundamental Rights incorporated into the Constitution and resoundingly adopted by Parliament. It is also a crime against the memory of all of those who suffered, in particular the tens, hundreds of thousands of children whose lives were destroyed in the most abject way, children whose sad stares we have seen in photographs. Let their terrified stares remain etched on our consciences and exhort us to pursue a determined and committed fight against forgetting and, worse, against complete denial of the crime.
Mr President, the defence of human rights – starting with all those who have been subjected to attacks on their dignity as part of the current wave of anti-Semitism and racism – is one of the cornerstones of European Union policy. To this end, the Council and the other institutions are working closely with international organisations such as the Council of Europe, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and the United Nations in the fight against what is a genuine scourge.
The Council has welcomed the initiatives taken by the OSCE, such as the adoption of the Berlin and Brussels declarations condemning all manifestations of anti-Semitism and all other acts of intolerance. During the ministerial-level meeting of the OSCE in Sofia, the posts of personal OSCE representatives for combating anti-Semitism, racism and islamophobia were created. This should help to reinforce the work of the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, which is the OSCE’s office in Warsaw responsible for monitoring instances of anti-Semitism and other examples of intolerance. During the 59th session of the United Nations General Assembly, a resolution explicitly condemning all forms of anti-Semitism was adopted on the initiative of the EU. In New York, on Human Rights Day, 10 December 2004, the Union pointed out the importance of education, an essential prerequisite to fostering the emergence of a culture of respect and tolerance that is consistent with safeguarding fundamental rights. The creation of a European Monitoring Centre for Racism and Xenophobia is in line with the desire on the part of the Council, and the Union as a whole, to have at its disposal the tools needed to combat the various forms of intolerance.
I have indeed read the paragraph on history books and the teaching of history that must be promoted at European level, and memory work with young people is a European initiative that must be supported, and the Presidency will ensure that this happens."@en1
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