Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2009-02-03-Speech-2-316"
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"en.20090203.20.2-316"2
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"− Mr President, first of all I would like to thank you for this debate. I believe it was very useful. If you had listened to the debate in the last Council meeting during lunch, you would have seen a similar will to cope with the problem, but also an appreciation of the complexity of the problem we are discussing. It has a moral and political dimension, but also a security and legal dimension.
We all agree that President Obama’s decision to close Guantánamo was an important and good one, which we all appreciate and which is applauded by practically all of you here. But now that we are discussing the consequences and what we can do to express solidarity – and our interest here is to act in transatlantic harmony – we, of course, see that the problem is a complex one. Martin Schulz has said that we cannot fight terrorism and, at the same time, get into a conflict over fundamental rights. He is perfectly right, but Hartmut Nassauer has said that there are two dimensions: one is the moral one and the other concerns security. He is also right, and that is exactly why the Ministers for Justice and home affairs have to discuss this as well. From the political perspective, it is not just a flexing of moral muscles, nor should we approach this problem just out of guilt. It is certainly more complex than that.
Graham Watson spoke of the need to approach this with one voice. Again, he is certainly right but, at the same time – because this also concerns the legal problem and the competence issue – we cannot force Member States to invite the detainees from Guantánamo on demand. If you had to solve this problem by deciding to invite those detainees to your homes – imagine taking on the responsibility of the Ministers for the Interior – you would certainly think twice about how this problem is to be handled. I certainly do not think it should be approached by the Council and the Member States as an issue of horse-trading – not at all. It is not about washing ourselves but not getting wet. At the core of the problem is simply the fact that the decision to close Guantánamo is, of course, the primary responsibility of the United States, the country which built the facility. But we have – and have to have – the goodwill to express solidarity and to be cooperative in solving the problem.
There is also the tactical debate. Should we offer this on a gold plate now, or should we wait until a request has been made? But if we do receive a request, we need to be prepared to react. Therefore, the Council started to discuss this seriously on the second day after President Obama’s decision. I do not think we can underestimate the security issue – as you have pointed out – as it is a simple fact that some of the inmates who were released re-engaged in terrorist activity, and it is a simple matter of fact that one man, Mr Said al-Shihri, is now the deputy head of al-Qa’ida in Yemen. So the US has to start the serious work of clearing up who those people are, and we have to break with them.
Legally, I think we have to be aware that the decision on the admission of foreign nationals to EU Member States is the national competence of the Member States. This is one level. However, on a second level, there is the agreement that we should now work towards a European framework in which to embed the national decision. Both the Schengen and the Dublin Agreements call for a European approach because the security of all Schengen members will be affected in some way by the decision of the individual Member States. So there is an internal imperative for a coordinated approach.
Furthermore, the EU is looking into the possibility of assisting the US with the resettlement and rehabilitation of former detainees in third countries.
Some of you have raised the question of speed: can we act faster than we are doing now? I think we should be aware that the discussion has only just begun. It has only been one week. The questions that have to be addressed are really complex and will need some time, although President Obama himself has requested a review of the prisoners’ files and has set a one-year deadline for the closure of Guantánamo. One should not expect the Council to be ready to fix all these complex problems in a matter of a few days.
Furthermore, it has to be kept in mind that the primary responsibility for Guantánamo rests with the US. Although the Member States express their readiness to work on a coordinated approach, the issue has a bilateral dimension as well as the multilateral one. A clear position of the respective Member States on the resettlement of detainees is not yet known. The meeting of the Justice and Home Affairs Ministers, which is to take place later this month, will be very useful here. In the meantime, the anti-terrorist coordinator, Gilles de Kerchove, is also working on various option papers here.
So that is my summary on Guantánamo, which occupied most of the time. On the other issue of illegal detention, Mr Fava’s favourite issue, I will just repeat what has been said several times by my predecessors: the allegation concerned the involvement of national intelligence agencies; the supervision of those agencies is the responsibility of individual Member States, and the Council has no power here to act beyond what was done."@en1
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