Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-07-09-Speech-3-264"
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"en.20080709.31.3-264"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, nobody here would question the importance of relations of all kinds with the Chinese government and even less the solidarity resulting from the earthquake. The statement that the President-in-Office has made does, however, raise a problem. That statement says absolutely nothing about the role that this Union can and must play in fostering the civil and political rights of everyone living on Chinese soil, in Tibet and not just in Tibet.
I should like to say a word on this, because otherwise welcoming the fact that foreign tourists have been allowed in again, without saying a word about everything that has happened, about the convictions, the public trials, the militarisation of Lhasa when the Olympic torch was passing through, the freedoms that continue to be denied, the torture which continues to be handed out, is a rather one-sided way of tackling a problem. The reaction to that one-sided approach may well be to brand it ingenuous, idealistic and meaningless, because there are people who think about serious things, about good relations with China, and then there are people who think about ingenuous and inconsistent things, i.e. us.
That is the outcome of a statement such as the one you have made: nor have you mentioned the Uighur people simply because they do not have a transnational leader supporting non-violence, such as the Dalai Lama, and I believe that that is serious when we are talking about China. That Europe is then a Europe which says, while all this is going on: ‘it is up to each Head of State to decide whether or not he is going and we French have meanwhile consulted our partners and we shall go as the Presidency of the European Union’. What Presidency is that? What European Union is that? That is the Europe of nations and China will rightly consider that the Europe of nations lacks the ability to come up with a policy able to force it do anything to respect the human rights of Chinese and other citizens."@en1
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