Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-11-29-Speech-3-140"
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"en.20061129.16.3-140"2
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".
Mr President, first of all I should like to thank Mrs Flautre for her very hard work and that of her staff in recent months in trying to bring this instrument to the point where we can adopt it by the end of this year. I would also like to thank the Commission and its staff, and the Council, for their work.
Both the Council and the Commission have worked very hard to try and achieve some sort of compromise on this instrument. I must say that, in general terms, the ambitions of the Chairman of the Human Rights Subcommittee, my co-rapporteur, have largely been met. I think on the question of human rights promotion, which represents universal values accepted worldwide, we now have an instrument which has the capacity and the flexibility to work effectively, primarily through civil society, and to achieve the goals of the European Union in its Treaty obligations towards human rights worldwide.
There is, however, a deficiency. As colleagues know, I was the original promoter and founding rapporteur of the European initiative back in 1992. It was aimed at the transformation of the ex-Soviet bloc and it looked primarily at the democratic process. In the world today we now face different challenges. I have spent some time this year going to countries which are ‘complex environments’, to use the terminology of the United Nations: China, Cuba and Russia. These are the challenges of today.
My question to Council and Commission – and since the Council has chosen to negotiate in public – is, why cannot we as a European Union avail ourselves of the same instruments that our Member State governments have given to the United Nations? I regard this as a great puzzle. During my recent visit to New York I spent some talk talking to the UNDP, which, in its handbook on dealing with political parties, says, ‘yet we have seen that the absence of strong, accountable and competent political parties that can represent positions and negotiate change, weakens the democratic process’. This is a parliament of political parties. Democracy cannot exist without competing political forces. So I just wonder whether the Council has lost its nerve. Faced with the challenges that we see to our east and to our south, is it really satisfactory that the European Union should not have the same capacity to involve itself in the political process, to reform countries where there is no democracy, that we have given to the United Nations?
I believe that the European Union should put its democracy money where its mouth is and include in the instrument a reference to supporting democratic political groups. That, in some countries, is the only way to effect change."@en1
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