Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-09-05-Speech-3-014"
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"en.20070905.2.3-014"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, we are accustomed to declaring that combating terrorism is a priority and invoking new political legislative initiatives.
I believe that we ought first to assess the choices that have been made over the last few years and ask some questions. Firstly: is terrorism stronger or weaker as a result of our legislative initiatives? Secondly: have we made a specific contribution to the development of our legal culture and our values, or have we betrayed them in the name of the terrorism crisis?
I believe we should make it a priority to answer these two questions, and that if we did so we would discover that emergency measures have often been mistaken and that the lists of terrorist organisations have been imprecise, often dictated more by political motives than a real danger posed by the organisations. We have appointed a person to coordinate counter-terrorism activities, and then we have found, without any clear reason, that we can do without the functions carried out by this person. I therefore ask the Council not to appoint a new counter-terrorism coordinator because over the last few months we have discovered that we can easily do without one.
We have often said, and we say it firmly, and I think that we ought to say it again in this Chamber, that terrorism is the enemy of our civilisation, it is the enemy of the rule of democracy: terrorism is barbarity. Terrorist attacks represent a move from the rule of law to a primitive state. All this is true, but instead of focusing the debate on the reinstatement of the rules of democracy we have chosen to tackle the issue by restricting the rules of civil coexistence. We have chosen to fight on our adversary’s home ground, to compete on violations of human rights, on military controls over the civilian population, on the negation of the key principles of democracy.
The images of Abu Ghraib or of the Guantanamo base are the symbol of the victory by the culture of terrorism over our rule of law and the key principles of our legal culture. The other symbol is the CIA’s flights and abductions in Europe, with the explicit involvement of European governments. There is an embarrassing silence about these events – as my fellow Members have done, I also call upon the Council to express itself on this point – there is an embarrassing silence, everyone has mentioned it! This Parliament has spoken about the responsibilities of the CIA, the responsibilities of European governments, the responsibilities of our intelligence services. The Commission has spoken and the Council of Europe is speaking about this. The only embarrassing silence is from the European governments and I believe that this is unacceptable. Let us hope that today the Council will state its view on this issue.
In Europe, unfortunately, the exception has become the rule and now we must have a clear debate on the effects produced by our legislative choices: biometric data in passports and visas, the system for control of personal data, databases on telephone communications, databases on air passengers, PNR agreements, the SWIFT system, the system of storing fingerprints and even the regulation on liquids, which we hope today to reject resoundingly, giving a signal to the Commission that we ought to make choices that are in proportion to what we want to combat.
I believe that we should say emphatically that we have chosen an authoritarian distortion of the rule of law instead of choosing to safeguard the rule of law in order to combat terrorism. It is not clear – and I am just finishing, Mr President – whether in the past few years European citizens have been put in more danger by terrorism or by the measures taken to combat terrorism. An American feminist writer has said that when we are offered solutions by those responsible for our problems we should be on our guard. I believe that we should be on our guard."@en1
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