Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-09-07-Speech-3-030"
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"en.20050907.2.3-030"2
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"Mr President, Mr Clarke, Vice-President Frattini, ladies and gentlemen, many of our Member States had, and are still having, problems with terrorist attacks. In Germany, we had the Red Army Fraction, Ireland has the IRA, and Spain ETA, all of which tried to pursue their objectives by means of violence. The attacks they carried out were cruel and lacking any justification, but the acts of terrorism we have seen so far were carried out for reasons of history or ideology and limited to one country or one region.
The ‘9/11’ events in the United States gave terrorism a wholly new dimension, and it acquired an unequivocally European one with the attacks in Madrid on 11 March and in London on 7 July. The conflict is no longer a merely national one; the Western world faces a massive threat. What the atrocities in London showed was that the perpetrators do not pass through porous borders in order to carry out terrorist acts in Europe. They are people living among us, who have taken our nationalities, attended our schools, people who go out to work and appear to be part of our society. These were not people who were denied opportunities by being on the fringes of our society. To all outward appearance, they were inconspicuous members of it, but they evidently did not feel any attachment to our lifestyles and values. Far from it; these terrorists set out to kill indiscriminately as a means of turning Europe, our values and our lives upside down.
Some of them had been living in our midst, as our neighbours, for years or even decades. That does not mean, though, that they were living with us. The attacks on London in particular showed that the idea of the ‘melting-pot society’ has failed. Tolerance, when misconceived as ‘do as you like’, does not result in a colourful and fruitful, tolerant and open, mix of cultures, lifestyles and opinions. What this misconceived tolerance does produce is parallel societies, groups to which we have no access, about whose activities we have scarcely any idea, and which function within our society with the aim of destroying it.
That is why there must be a response to this threat by the Member States and the European Union as a whole, using not only legislation but also the machinery of law enforcement. Together and in cooperation with each other, we must protect our citizens. There is a need for rigorous measures at European level, which need to be transposed at national level without delay, thoroughly and purposefully.
One of the measures we have already adopted is the European Arrest Warrant, the purpose of which is to extradite criminals from one Member State to another quickly and with relatively little red tape. That can help to put terrorists and those behind them out of action more quickly. In Germany, though, this essentially good European measure has proved a failure. The courts were obliged to set at liberty a German of Syrian origin who was suspected of involvement in the terrorist attack in Madrid. You may well ask why. It was not for lack of any anti-terrorist legislation in Germany. The current red and green Federal Government made such a botched job of implementing the European Arrest Warrant that German law had to give way to the German supreme court, with the result that a terrorist suspect had to be released from custody and the Spanish authorities can no longer prosecute him.
What this shows is that mistakes made in one Member State can affect the security of people in all the others. If what happened in Madrid or London is not to be repeated elsewhere, integration into our society has to be taken seriously. The right of permanent residence should be made conditional on a desire to really immigrate and the willingness to adopt a new manner of life, new forms and standards in a new homeland. We have to make it clear that European society offers human rights, democracy, freedom, the equality of men and women, concern for our neighbours, social justice and much more, while, on the other hand, requiring people to adopt our democratic values, our conception of freedom and of its defence.
While action in the spheres of policy-making, the law and the criminal justice system are necessary, a European consciousness and sense of European identity must come into being to unite us, not merely economically as an economic and currency union, but as a community of values. We must have something to set against ideologies that tend towards extremism and radicalism and find their ultimate expression in terrorist acts and suicide bombings, and that something is a society whose citizens live together and stand by each other because they live in a society that they share, that is worth living in and worth working for, and in the construction of which they had – and have – a part."@en1
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