Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-06-07-Speech-2-293"
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"en.20050607.27.2-293"2
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".
Mr President, this report on the protection of minorities and anti-discrimination policies in an enlarged European Union is an extremely wide report. From the title, Members of this House could see almost immediately that we in the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs were dealing with two very big areas.
Finally I want to say that this has been a difficult report but we have to identify that the way any Member State treats its minorities is a measure of how advanced that Member State really is. This is a very important test. We saw it in the Copenhagen criteria and we should see it today: that a Member State can be measured by how it protects its minorities, how it protects diversity within its population. We in the European Union already have the legislation to do this. We must use it, and we must develop a definition of minorities which everyone can accept. There have been difficulties in this report, but I hope that definition will be broadly acceptable to all Members across this House.
Firstly we were dealing with extending and deepening the definition of what it means to be a minority in the enlarged European Union. But we were also dealing with unfinished business: we were dealing with the response to the Green Paper on anti-discrimination. Both areas are extremely wide and probably required reports of their own, but we have tried to put these issues together in one report and I hope I have touched on the key issues, however difficult they have been.
Because this has been a difficult report, I want to thank at the very outset the shadow rapporteurs and other colleagues in the Chamber today for all their help in meeting the aims of this report. It has been difficult and there are one or two issues still to be sorted out before the vote tomorrow.
But let me return to the substance of this report. I care very passionately about ensuring that there is a definition of what it means to be a minority in the new enlarged European Union. We know that the protection of minorities was part of the Copenhagen criteria for enlargement of the European Union, but equally we realise that there was no real standard for minority rights in the European Union and in Community policy. And because of this gap, we wanted to ensure that this report took at least one step forward in attempting to make that definition.
That definition is a very wide one. It includes all the traditional definitions that we understood in the existing 15 Member States under Article 13 of the Treaty, where we talked about minorities which suffered from disabilities, the issue of age, religion, sexual orientation, race and ethnic origin. But in the enlarged European Union we also have to understand that we are talking about traditional minorities: linguistic minorities and national minorities.
It is also important to understand the changing nature of the European Union. A recent debate in this House on the Roma identified that minority as probably the largest in the European Union and deserving of a rapid and deep response to the problems that they face.
So this report tries to take on two areas. I shall deal with each of them. First, the response to the Green Paper and Article 13. Here in my report I find that the implementation and transposition of the existing directives which the Commission brought forward and this Parliament voted through, and the strengthening of legislation in relation to discrimination on the grounds of disability, age, religion, sexual orientation, race and ethnic origin, was far too slow. Too many Member States have failed to implement existing directives, and although the legislation is very good and some Member States have transposed it, there is insufficient will in the European Union to transpose what already exists. I hope this report will take one step further with the Commission – and I know the Commission has been making strides on this in bringing Member States to account, but I hope that Member States will see for themselves the benefit of transposing this legislation.
Article 13 legislation, the race equality directive and the employment directive are valuable because they can apply equally to the Roma minority, as they do to second or third generation ethnic minority migrants in Britain or France or Italy. And that is the beauty of this legislation: it is easy to transpose. But it needs the political will of the Member States in order to implement it.
On the definition of minorities, here we have to take seriously the question of traditional, national and linguistic minorities. We have to understand that there are many people in the European Union who want to protect their diversity, but they feel they are a minority and therefore vulnerable. This report seeks to look at those areas, not to impose solutions on Member States, but to have a standard in the European Union that says that if you are a minority you are also a European Union citizen worthy of respect and worthy of carrying on your own cultural traditions, language or whatever it may be."@en1
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