Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-09-08-Speech-4-145"
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"en.20050908.19.4-145"2
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".
Mr President, while I congratulate Mr Meijer on his excellent and very precise speech, I have to say that I was amazed to hear what some Members said earlier on. No wonder Christians are so brutally deprived of their rights and persecuted as they currently are when we consider how some of Europe’s leadership class behave. Even in this House, there are those who, when they speak, cannot bring themselves to denounce the violations of Christians’ human rights in China unless they have prefaced them with expressions of hostility to the Church that have nothing whatever to do with this issue, and who, in a debate devoted to the fundamental rights of victims of persecution, cannot refrain from indulging in criticism of World Youth Day.
While there is of course no Christian monopoly in this European Union of ours, and quite rightly not, 85% of the EU’s inhabitants are Christian, 56% being Catholics. These people, too, have a right to appropriate political representation. Who is supposed to speak up, not only for the persecuted and tiny Christian minorities in China, but also for that country’s Jews, Muslims and Buddhists, if we do not? The Islamic world takes up the cause of their brothers and sisters of the Muslim faith who are persecuted in places such as China; it is only we Europeans who have to keep on downplaying these violations of human rights or adopting a critical attitude. In so doing, we make ourselves complicit in them.
Seeing the pictures of Mr Blair at the EU/China summit reminds me of how it was he who told us that the EU was for him more than a free trade zone. I see no evidence of that being so, for, if he really did regard it as a community of values, he would adopt a foreign policy that focused on human rights – including these human rights – even in his dealings with a large country such as China. The same can be said of Chancellor Schröder, to whose solitary attempt at relaxing the arms embargo we have, thank God, put a stop. We need a unity that transcends party boundaries if we are to speak out clearly, even to a large country such as China, in the cause of human rights and religious freedom."@en1
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