Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-12-12-Speech-2-229"
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"en.20061212.41.2-229"2
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"Mr President, Mrs Lehtomäki has called the Sakharov Prize into question and I would like to say to her that the Women in White are defenceless women, wives, mothers and daughters of Cuban political dissidents, who make a huge effort to come from many different Cuban towns to meet peacefully and silently on Sundays and to walk together through the streets of Havana dressed in white. They were doing so this Sunday, when they suffered harassment, threats and insults from people who saw fit to celebrate human rights day in that way. It is absurd for me to have to point out that these women are not dangerous counter-revolutionary terrorists funded by the CIA, but simply women who are not willing to give in to injustice and the trampling of their most fundamental rights as human beings.
It is therefore also ridiculous that the Cuban regime should still not be allowing some of its representatives to leave the country to receive the Sakharov Prize that the European Parliament awarded to them last year.
We do not know what has happened with the efforts that the President of this Parliament promised to make a year ago now, but if he has done anything, then its results are plain to see.
I am therefore pleased with the initiative by Mrs Flautre and Mr Brok to send a delegation to the island. Personally, I would not be opposed to that delegation also taking advantage of that trip to talk with the country’s authorities and hence to gauge the changing political climate.
I would however call upon the European Parliament’s services immediately to begin the formal procedures for requesting the relevant permits for entry into the country. I would also call upon the Commission and the Council to apply all the pressure it can to ensure that those permits are granted.
If the response is favourable, as I hope it will be, we could express a minimum but effective degree of solidarity. If it is negative, however, Mr President, then that would demonstrate the attitude of the current Cuban Government, something of which the European institutions should take very good note."@en1
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