Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-03-08-Speech-2-338"

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". Mr President, I shall start by expressing my thanks and paying tribute to colleagues across this House who regularly attend the ACP meetings and contribute so much to it. I also pay equal tribute to the parliamentarians of the ACP countries, without whom this partnership and dialogue would not be possible. In so doing, I would also like to pay tribute to the joint secretariats of our Parliament and the Assembly, the interpreters and staff who accompany us, and the Commissioners, officials and members of the presidency who attend. This is a team effort and it is a team effort that we need to endorse and encourage. However, this evening I would like to pay a particular tribute to the Co-President of the ACP, Glenys Kinnock, who has been away from our circle for some time. It is very good to see her back this evening I hope in good health and ready to face the fray of the next Parliamentary Assembly. Her contribution is fundamental to what we seek to do. The European Parliament is a new parliament. Slowly but steadily we have been taking on powers and becoming, I hope, more effective. The same is true of the Joint Parliamentary Assembly. That too has been slowly becoming more effective and, if not taking on powers, at least becoming more influential. The Assembly started somewhat tentatively. In the early days the European Parliament was perhaps dominant, but reliant all too often on separate House votes; whereas the ACP was a bit more on the defensive, often represented by ambassadors or delegations of only government parties. Now we see change. We see few if any separate House votes. We see a parliament of parliamentarians. We see the ACP gaining in self-confidence and indeed, most recently at our bureau meeting, raising issues about human rights in Europe; and quite right too. The ACP was, for example, raising the issues of the British Government, its attitude to Guantanamo Bay and its proposals for the detention of suspects, or indeed people with mental health problems. Now we look ahead. We look ahead to budgetisation. We hope that will come soon. That will enable us to give proper scrutiny and proper control of the budget. However, when we do that we will have to balance that scrutiny on behalf of our own taxpayers with acknowledgement of the ACP countries’ right to a say in how money is spent; we need to be listening, as well as scrutinising. We need to ensure that the Millennium Development Goals and the country strategy papers are adequate in themselves and adequately followed. The Joint Parliamentary Assembly has now developed an effective system of standing committees, firing on all cylinders and getting members working together. Despite the fact that during 2004 we had our European election and so things were more difficult, we managed with electronic communication to bring forth some effective reports. My own with Mr Sanga of the Solomon Islands on food aid and food security was an example of that. I would like to pay tribute to the Dutch Government for the way in which it hosted the Assembly in The Hague. I think it learned a lot from our experience in Rome with their workshops and their visits. I should also like to thank the Ethiopian Government for its hospitality and effective administration in Addis Ababa. We are of a mind that, in Europe, we should continue to have one of the two Council presidencies per year hosting the Assembly, and perhaps to swap around the winter and spring to give the ACP Members a little more warmth of welcome in weather as well as politics. But a lot has already been achieved. In our debates we have a better balance of speakers from the floor and fewer long speeches from the platform, and we are of a mind that we should do more to support the new pan-African Parliament, perhaps with exchange of personnel. But now we move on to Mali in April, when we will be looking at serious issues of human rights; humanitarian aid; post-tsunami development aid; working together to defeat poverty, hunger and disease; and to create the opportunities for achievement and the blossoming of those rich countries which make up the ACP of Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific. Finally, I shall give the quotation from Yehudi Menuhin that I used in my report: ‘Peace may sound simple – one beautiful word – but it requires everything we have, every quality, every strength, every dream, every high ideal’. That is why we seek to make the ACP Joint Parliamentary Assembly effective. I believe we are doing so and I heartily endorse the work that all our colleagues put into this."@en1
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