Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-04-14-Speech-4-188"
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"en.20050414.27.4-188"2
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"Mr President, what is the connection between the Western Sahara, the topic before last in our debate, and Lampedusa, which we are discussing now? At the beginning of the 1980s, this House – on another Thursday afternoon – held an urgent debate on North Africa. The topic was the Western Sahara and Gaddafi’s influence in North Africa. This House was, on that occasion, forthrightly critical of Gaddafi, as was the then Italian government under its then Prime Minister Andreotti, and in consequence of that, Gaddafi had missiles fired at the little island, which was the first time that Lampedusa became known around the world. What that highlights is Lampedusa’s exposed position off the coast of Africa and the Libyan mainland.
What is happening on Lampedusa is not about one or two immigrants landing on it here and there; what is going on there is systematic and brutal trafficking in human beings. People are quite deliberately being brought to Lampedusa via Libya and from there on smuggled into the European Union. As soon as they are on the European mainland, they can get to Munich, Strasbourg, The Hague or wherever, without once being checked up on. If we do not want this systematic traffic in human beings to continue, we have to act, and act together. This issue is, for that reason, too important for us to allow it to be downgraded to a cheap way of scoring points in an election.
If we are going to talk as if we were fighting an election, then I would like to say that I was advocating years ago that we should lay down common quotas for refugees, sharing the burden between the Member States and bringing their standards for refugees and asylum seekers into line, arguing that what we needed most of all was fixed quotas in order to share the burden. Who or what was it that did nothing to achieve this? The Commission, which was then under Mr Prodi! He, then, the leader of the Italian opposition, should clean his own side of the street first. This is not about domestic policy on the cheap; instead, we should discharge our responsibility as Europeans."@en1
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