Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-06-07-Speech-2-039"
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"en.20050607.5.2-039"2
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"Mr President, I should like to thank all the rapporteurs for the work that has gone into producing the reports that we are discussing today, which repeatedly stress the fact that upholding and promoting human rights is the most important and best strategy for preventing and fighting terror. Commissioner Frattini has indicated that counter-terrorism should, in fact, entail a reinforcement of human rights, and I could not agree more. Upholding and promoting such important values as democracy, freedom, pluralism and human dignity is crucial in the fight against terrorism. It is beyond dispute that in order to make this really happen, we will need to fundamentally reconsider large sections of our policy, particularly external policy.
The radicalisation and polarisation that so often both go towards producing terrorism and result from it are at least as great a threat to the European Union as terrorism itself. We politicians must be acutely aware of this and try to keep a cool head at all times. Rather than stir up fear unnecessarily, we must be realistic and avoid getting drawn into the hysteria that only fuels the tensions on which terrorism feeds.
In any case, we must not fall into the trap of going along with the bizarre arguments to which terrorists resort in order to justify their disgraceful actions. We must take measures which truly enhance the freedom of all citizens and keep well away from measures that only appear to enhance security. In that connection, two of the measures discussed at this forum deserve more attention, in my opinion.
First of all, the idea of penalising terrorism at the International Criminal Court. I wonder what specific problem that would solve. Must we really treat terrorists as we do ex-dictators like Milosevic? I know this much; the man who murdered Theo van Gogh, a well-known film maker and much-talked about columnist and opinion maker from my country, the Netherlands, would love to be able to use the platform that such a case would afford him. I am therefore emphatically opposed to that idea.
Then there is the storage of communications traffic data, an example of a measure that leads only to false security, if ever there was one. I shall not elaborate on it any further, since much has already been said about this. It is disproportionate, it restricts our freedom and I think it is this very freedom that we have to promote in the European Union. There are risks involved; you can introduce all kinds of restrictions with regard to accessibility to information of that kind, but let us face it, anything that is available on the Internet is universally accessible, no matter how well protected it is, so the risks involved probably outweigh the benefits. I do not think we should go ahead with this. Instead, as the Internet is indeed developing into by far the best means of communication for people who want to find out about terrorists and recruit them for others, we should get our security services to specialise in Internet participation, in reading and chatting on the Internet, in other words, to actively monitor what happens in that medium. That would make a real difference
To find out afterwards which websites a person has visited after they have carried out a bomb attack does not strike me as being the best strategy. We must prevent those bomb attacks from being carried out in the first place. I think that such a measure – the legal basis of which has been discussed here several times and moreover, the way in which this decision has been taken is a blatant violation of democracy – undermines confidence in European democracy, the risks of which have recently made themselves felt in a painful manner."@en1
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