Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-04-25-Speech-3-250"
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"en.20070425.35.3-250"2
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Madam President, Commissioner, honourable Members, I am glad to be able, as the Presidency’s representative, to participate in your honourable House’s debate today on this year’s report on human rights and the human rights situation around the world.
With that in mind, I am able to inform you that the presidency welcomes the Council resolution on the commencement of a human rights dialogue between the European Union and Uzbekistan, preparations for the first round of which are underway. The next rounds of the human rights dialogue between the EU and China and of the human rights consultations with Russia are also due to take place shortly, the one being in early May and the other in the middle of that month, and I should like to inform you that the consultations with Russia will – as was requested in your report – involve European and Russian NGOs.
One demand made in the annual report was that MEPs be accorded a bigger role in the conduct of dialogues and consultations, and the Council was urged to ensure that they were involved in them. Perhaps I might be permitted to say, by way of a reply to that, that the composition of EU delegations conducting dialogues with third states reflects the demarcation of powers under the Common Foreign and Security Policy, and so it is not possible for Members of your honourable House to take part in these dialogues. That does not, however, mean that you will not be continually informed of developments, or that there will be no ongoing exchange of views concerning them.
I would now, with your President’s permission, like to say something about the Presidency’s statement on the moratorium on the use of the death penalty.
The campaign against capital punishment has for a long time been a core element in the EU’s common policy on human rights; the campaign against the death penalty was, indeed, the subject of the first guidelines to be adopted on human rights by the Council back in 1998, and the continuation of the various measures whereby the European Union has been consistently advocating the abolition of the death penalty since then is one of the German Presidency’s human rights policy priorities.
We last discussed the death penalty issue at the mini-session in January, when I announced to you that the German Presidency of the Council would put together a well thought-out plan of action for what we planned to do in the first half of 2007 in order to take the campaign against the death penalty to the United Nations, and I can inform you today that we have done what was announced as planned.
On the basis of an analysis carried out by the heads of all the EU’s partners’ permanent representations in Geneva and New York, and of numerous conversations with NGO representatives, Germany, at the end of February, produced an action plan for 2007 setting out concrete measures for a progressive approach to raising the issue of the death penalty at the United Nations, which all its partners accepted, and which the Presidency has, since then, been consistently putting into practice.
The first step of this plan of action was taken when, at the opening of the fourth session of the Human Rights Council in Geneva, the problem of capital punishment was put high up on the agenda, and my ministerial colleague Mr Steinmeyer, in his capacity as President-in-Office of the EU Council, deliberately touched on the issue in his speech. Several ministers from EU Member States who were taking part in the opening of the fourth session of the Human Rights Council followed the Presidency in urging the abolition of capital punishment, and the Council’s session in March saw the second reading, with the addition of new supporters, of the declaration against the death penalty, which had, at the European Union’s initiative been put before the UN General Assembly in December 2006 and signed by a total of 85 states from all corners of the globe.
The second step of the action plan saw the Presidency, in April, starting up a worldwide lobbying campaign, the object of which is to collect more votes in favour of the December 2006 declaration against the death penalty and to forge a multi-regional alliance willing to support the tabling of a resolution in the United Nations.
When this global
is completed – somewhere around the end of May – the European Union will undertake a comprehensive evaluation of the lobbying campaign’s results, and, on that basis, decide whether the time is ripe for a UN resolution, and if not now, when it might be.
Perhaps I might stress what I mentioned back in January, namely that a reopening of the debate in the United Nations at the present time, before the
is accomplished, would be strategically ill-advised, it being somewhat improbable that any such proposal would gain the support of two-thirds of the Member States, which is what is required, and this could set a negative precedent, in that other Member States could feel themselves encouraged to respond by putting, outside the regular meetings of the General Assembly, other contentious issues back on the agenda, and, above all, we do not yet know whether we will be able to summon up the necessary majority support from all regions. The object of our currently ongoing global
is to find this out, and we should defer further decisions until such time as it has yielded results.
Like its predecessors in former years, this report engages critically with what the European Union has been doing about its human rights policy, and its critical outlook is one that we welcome, being persuaded as we are that it helps to enhance and improve our common action in protection of human rights, for we are all too aware of the day-to-day challenges to be faced in this area. The better the functioning of dialogue between our institutions, the more likely we are to be able to act together more effectively in pursuance of our human rights policy.
Let me, then, once more stress that the campaign against the death penalty is just as important to the Council as it is to your House; no less than you do, we want to see this cruel, inhumane and ineffective form of punishment done away with, but the battle is not an easy one. Goodwill alone is not enough; on the contrary, only a strategic approach will enable us to achieve our objective, and that is what we in the German Presidency of the Council, together with our partners at Council level, are determined to do, and we very much hope that we may, in pursuing this end, be able to rely on your House’s full support.
Perhaps I might be permitted to kick off with a practical proposal; I will be requesting that the Council working party responsible for the European Union’s international human rights policy (COHOM) should discuss your House’s report and consider in greater depth the demands and recommendations relevant to its work. It would then be possible, at a later date, for the finally adopted version of the report and the commentaries of the relevant Council working party to serve as the basis for a continuation of the debate, and so I propose, today, to address only a few of the recommendations.
The report acknowledges the greater cooperation between your House and the EU Presidencies in drawing up and debating the European Union’s annual report on the human rights situation. Evidence of the progress in our cooperation is furnished
by the presentation by your House of its human rights activities in a chapter of the EU annual report devoted to it, and we are keen that this cooperation and the dialogue with the European Parliament, and with its sub-committee on human rights in particular, should be continued. Although we are aware of the important contribution made by your House to the protection of human rights, which is to be acknowledged appropriately in the European Union’s annual report, I would also like to stress that our cooperation has to be within the framework of, and in compliance with, the legal basis applicable to the Common Foreign and Security Policy, and that your House’s role – as is rightly stated in the explanatory section of Mr Coveney’s report – consists in the critical review of the European Union’s activities in the human rights sphere.
One important facet of human rights policy this year is the establishment of the United Nations’ new Human Rights Council, the importance of which your House’s report stresses, while also, and rightly, highlighting this body’s potential future role as a valuable forum in which the European Union might work multilaterally for the defence of human rights. The report finds it regrettable that the new Human Rights Council has demonstrated its own excessive inefficiency in responding to human rights crises around the world in an appropriate manner, and I would say, in response to that, that it is as yet too early to be able to pass judgment, and that we have to await the outcome of the institutional decision-making process, which is due at the end of June. The European Union will do everything in its power to ensure that the Human Rights Council continues to develop as an efficient but also credible element in the United Nations’ human rights system.
The demand has been made, with regard to the situation in Darfur, which is one of the most important issues considered at the last meeting of the Human Rights Council, that the European Union and the Member States should do more to get their views accepted, so that the Council, following the report by its special mission, might be able to take appropriate and adequate steps to respond to this humanitarian catastrophe. My comment on that is that the unanimous adopting of the document on Darfur by the Fourth Human Rights Council must be counted a significant triumph for the EU.
I would like to briefly mention the other important instruments of our EU human rights policy, namely the guidelines set down by the EU for its relations with third states with particular reference to the abolition of capital punishment, the campaign against torture, the protection of human rights activists and the position of children caught up in armed conflict. Your House’s annual report highlights the importance of these guidelines and indicates the need for them to be more effectively complied with. We share this view, and also welcome the work already done by your House’s sub-committee on human rights. At the end of its term, the German Presidency of the Council will report in detail on the ways in which the various guidelines have been acted upon.
Today, I would particularly like to highlight the Presidency’s efforts to date in relation to the abolition of the death penalty, which is one of the Council’s principal priorities among the European Union’s measures in the field of human rights policy. In order to achieve further progress on this front, the Presidency has drawn up an action plan for 2007, which is currently being put into effect and which has as its objective the tabling at appropriate levels of the United Nations of measures aimed at the abolition of the death penalty, about which I shall have more to say later on.
Other notable instruments of our human rights policy include the dialogues and consultations on the subject with third countries, which will be the subject of a parliamentary report; we welcome this initiative and will take careful note of your House’s recommendations. Despite the difficulties inherent in human rights dialogues, we do believe that these are not to be underestimated as a means of expressing our misgivings about the state of human rights in a given third country and – albeit sometimes only in the long term – bringing about a change in the situation there."@en1
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