Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-09-03-Speech-3-987"
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"en.20080903.23.3-987"2
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".
Mr President, I wish to thank the rapporteur, Mrs Flautre, for a balanced and worthy report, whose insistence on the re-evaluation of EU sanctions and research as part of the EU’s wider human rights policy is only right and proper. As long as we lack information based on large-scale research, the debate on the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of sanctions will remain a fruitless task.
Sanctions can be of significance in human rights policy in two complementary ways. On the one hand, they are a moral message from the European community of values and, as such, a valuable signal. On the other hand, they can have a tangible impact on the development of the target state. Both these aspects have definitely been important in cases where actual lasting results have been achieved, for example in the dismantling of South Africa’s apartheid policy.
It is probably obvious, however, that sanctions alone cannot achieve results like this. For a country’s human rights and political situation actually to change permanently, the coordination and comprehensive use of the instruments of human rights policy are required. Parliament has stressed before how important it is to have a more effective assembly for human rights policy.
In order to avoid human catastrophes, we should look into the possibility of more focused sanctions, which target, in particular, a country’s leaders and groups who violate human rights. We should be wary, in particular, of the sort of crippling measures that destroy chances for small and medium-sized enterprises to grow.
My own question here is what criteria should be used to impose sanctions. It is regrettable that all too often, behind the evaluation of sanctions, one can discern a concern over how appropriate they might be, which is based on the Union’s commercial interests."@en1
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