Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-09-05-Speech-3-344"
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"en.20070905.24.3-344"2
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"Madam President, in the second half of the twentieth century, and especially in the last three decades, democracy and respect for human rights have made enormous progress, but there is still a great deal to be done.
A few months ago in Berlin, in the Declaration adopted on the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Rome, the EU institutions formally expressed their desire to promote freedom and democracy in the world.
In this policy we must work openly on the principle that respect for human rights affects the whole of the international community and that these rights are universal. These two ideas are expressly mentioned in the final document adopted at the New York Summit in 2005.
The theory that there are parts of the world which, for one reason or another, are exempt from observing human rights is not acceptable, in other words, the theory that there are regimes that cannot be required to respect freedoms.
I would like to recall here the brilliant essays by Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen on the global roots of democracy and democracy as a universal value. In short, the promotion of human rights should play a very important role in the EU’s relations with all third countries.
One of the tools for this is dialogue, which is why I think it would be good to produce a report that helps to organise and systematise human rights dialogues that the European Union conducts with other countries.
I welcome the fact that paragraph 31 of the report calls on the Council to ensure that the initiation or suspension of a dialogue complies with clear criteria and for a prior impact assessment. I also agree that dialogue should not be an end in itself.
I would like to end by briefly talking about Cuba, which is not mentioned in the report, and where, unfortunately, human rights and basic freedoms are still not respected. However, the Council recently decided to propose initiating a comprehensive dialogue with Cuba that would include these rights.
It is well known that the position of the majority of Parliament is that it does not agree with the somewhat erratic policy that the Council has been following in the last three years with the Castro regime. In our view, the priority before any other initiative, should be firm insistence on the freeing of political prisoners."@en1
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