Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-01-17-Speech-3-129"
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"en.20070117.8.3-129"2
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".
Mr President, the general purpose of this speech is to express my group’s endorsement of the report by Mr Romeva i Rueda, for we are working very closely together with him on this.
The EU’s Member States are now the world’s number one arms exporters – ahead of either the USA or Russia. Among them, the leaders are France, Germany and the United Kingdom, but the Netherlands, Sweden and Italy are also playing major roles. Weapons kill whether they are exported from the EU or from somewhere else. That amounts to a gross violation of human rights, and a stop must be put to it.
In answering the question as to what part is played by the Code of Conduct, I would like to quote from a document produced by Germany’s Joint Conference on Church and Society, which has this to say: ‘The Code of Conduct has not, however, had the effect of curbing European weapons exports. According to surveys by SIPRI, the EU states, in 2005, overtook the traditional weapons exporters Russia and the USA.’ That the EU’s code is still merely a voluntary undertaking by the Member States is a scandal. What is needed is a Common Position by the Council, which would be binding in law on everyone.
The European Union has now set up an armaments agency, the function of which is to promote the arms industry within the European Union. The report I quoted earlier has this to say: ‘Moreover, the creation of the European Defence Agency provides the means whereby European cooperation in armaments may be promoted, which is not counterbalanced by any efforts to monitor rearmament’. That is precisely the problem, and it is for that reason that we have tabled an amendment to the effect that there should be, instead of an armaments agency, an agency for disarmament, for what is needed, rather than an agency to promote arms exports, is for a stop to be put to them.
Let me give you a few concrete examples of the countries to which they are being exported. Arms are being exported from Germany to Iraq, a trade earning EUR 28.9 million in 2004, and EUR 25 million in 2005. The report refers to the export of weaponry to the following countries: Afghanistan, Algeria, Bangladesh, Columbia, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Nigeria, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, the Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Thailand, Tunisia and the United Arab Emirates – in other words, very definitely too many of them. It is for that reason that we say that there must be a stop put to the export of weapons; armaments kill, and that must stop.
What I expect of the European Union and of the German Presidency of the Council is that steps be taken to this end and that there should be no more funding of the armaments agency, for there has now come to be a sort of correlation between the European Union’s military adventures on the one hand and its exports of weaponry on the other, so its arms exports must be brought to an end."@en1
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