Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-03-08-Speech-2-169"
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"en.20050308.20.2-169"2
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"Mr President, I wish to talk about one or two aspects with respect to North Korea. This is a country that over the last 12 to 18 months has engaged in massive and irreversible steps on the road to economic reform, in particular in industry and agriculture. However, the nuclear crisis is still hanging over us.
Over the last five years, the European Union has put half a billion euros into North Korea in humanitarian and development aid, yet we have not been included in the six-party talks. Several weeks ago, the North Korean Ambassador to Berlin spoke to Parliament's new delegation for relations with the Korean Peninsula and indicated that North Korea would welcome our participation, as would the Chinese and the South Koreans. In our joint resolution we are asking the Commission and the Council to investigate the possibility of the European Union being part of that programme. That may help to break the logjam we are facing there. The European Parliament would not like a situation in which it has no say in the onward negotiations but, like last time round with the framework agreement, is left with the bill!
My second point is not on the plutonium programme – North Korea has stated that it now has nuclear weapons – but on one of the causes of the crisis, which was the claim by the United States that North Korea had a highly enriched uranium programme. It looks as though North Korea got the blueprints from Pakistan, but the Americans have produced no evidence that it has an ongoing programme. Neither has it the necessary materials to produce the gas centrifuges, or the quality or quantity of electricity – which would have to be enough to power a medium-sized city in Europe – to undertake that programme.
My last point concerns the Korean Energy Development Organisation. The Council has chosen not to pay the EUR 4 million to South Korea as suspension costs for that programme, which therefore threatens its future. I know some in this House would not like to see it refined into a nuclear programme, but it could well serve as a very useful channel for non-nuclear conventional or renewable energies. We ask the Council to look again at whether this small contribution, which would buy a couple of flats in London, should not be made to enable us to have that political impact."@en1
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