Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-01-17-Speech-3-120"
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"en.20070117.8.3-120"2
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".
Mr President, this is now the third time that it has been my honour to address the Commission and the Council to present them with the European Parliament’s annual assessment of the implementation of the Code of Conduct on Arms Exports.
For all of these reasons, I hope that the report that this House will approve tomorrow, given its content and its political timeliness, will help in some way to improve the control of arms exports, both at European and global levels, within the framework of a future international treaty on the transfer of arms, which we hope is not too far away.
I am delighted to be doing so at a time when, at the request of the Secretary-General of the United Nations, the process has formally begun to adopt an international treaty on the transfer of arms, which furthermore is something that broad sectors of civil society throughout the world have always demanded.
You will have noticed that this time we have analysed two consecutive years, 2004 and 2005, in order to put an end to the time lag that has happened with previous reports between the presentation of the annual report by the Council and the European Parliament's assessment. Nevertheless, in spite of the fact that the Council has considerably speeded up the presentation of its annual report, it is still arriving too late – the 2005 report arrived in the autumn – and we are therefore once again insisting that it would be desirable for the Council to continue with its recent efforts to ensure transparency and punctuality and for the annual report to be available at least during the first quarter of the following year. The European Parliament must of course also do its bit and must respond punctually to the presentation of the Council's annual report.
With regard to the specific content of the report that we are dealing with today, relating, as has been said, to the Council's seventh and eighth reports, I would like to stress certain significant data and facts.
Firstly, the data. According to the statistics provided, the trend with regard to the weight of European arms exports compared to those from the rest of the world is being maintained, since around a third of all arms exports originate from the European Union. In 2004, European arms exports were worth almost EUR 10 billion and in 2005 that figure was EUR 9 billion. Nevertheless, what interests us here also is the total value of the licences issued, because that is what demonstrates whether the Code of Conduct is really being applied properly. From that point of view, the figures rise to EUR 25 billion for 2004 and EUR 26 billion for 2005.
Furthermore, another significant and worrying fact is that the countries buying European arms include China, Colombia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Indonesia, Israel and Nepal, names which are regularly raised in debates on urgent matters on Thursday afternoons in this Parliament, which on the face of it would appear to be a flagrant violation of the very content of the Code of Conduct.
Secondly, and this is surely the most important aspect that we point out in our report, we must express our great disappointment at the fact that, despite the fact that Coreper decided back in June 2005 to turn the current Code of Conduct into a common position, thereby giving it a legal status at European level that it does not yet have, and despite the fact that the technical work for this change was done months ago by COAR exports, the Council has yet to bring it into effect. The most significant factor is that, in the absence of an explicit reason for that delay, the implicit underlying reason is that certain governments would be making that transformation, and hence the strengthening of the Code of Conduct, conditional upon the simultaneous lifting of the arms embargo on China.
Please allow me to make something very clear. We in this House have always believed the two issues to be independent of each other. With regard to the arms embargo on China, the Council and the Commission know what our position has been and that is that its lifting must be conditional upon clear and effective progress in terms of respect for human rights in China, particularly in relation to the events in Tiananmen Square in 1989.
It is clearly an important issue, and we are going to debate it, but what concerns us today is the European Union’s Code of Conduct on Arms Exports, which relates to arms exports to the whole world, not just to China. In that regard, and in other words, and excuse my frankness, we do not understand and we do not accept that delay, and nor do the huge number of organisations in civil society who for years have been working in favour of a bigger and better mechanism for controlling arms exports, both at European and at world levels, with a view to reducing the damaging impact that this kind of trade often has."@en1
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