Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2009-03-25-Speech-3-285"
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"en.20090325.27.3-285"2
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".
Mr President, we are on the verge of new relations between the European Union and the United States. We all know how badly those relations were damaged by eight years of George W. Bush in the White House. That is why so many Europeans were pleased to see the election of Barack Obama and his promise of approaching a number of areas in a fundamentally different way. Mr Millán Mon’s report brings up all these important issues. Examples of this include the joint approach on climate change and the financial and economic crisis. There are other examples, too, such as the need to follow a new strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan and the closure of the Guantánamo Bay detention camp. That last issue, Guantánamo Bay, was one of the wrongs that badly damaged the moral authority of the United States around the world. The same applies to issues such as torture and rendition. President Obama intends to bring an end to such practices and that is something that my group, too, warmly welcomes.
There is one other decision, perhaps one that is less obvious, but one that, in my eyes, is also shameful and that needs to be reversed, and reversed as soon as possible. What I am referring to is the refusal by the United States to cooperate with the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague. Worse still, the US Congress took revenge by passing the American Service-Members’ Protection Act just a month after the ICC came into being in July 2002.
What exactly does that Act state? The Act prohibits US institutions and citizens from cooperating with, or passing information to, the ICC. It obliges Americans to obtain an international guarantee of immunity before participating in United Nations operations. In other words, it makes it impossible to prosecute them. Countries that are signed up to the ICC can be punished for it and the United States does punish them. Finally, there is the element that caused the most fuss in my own country, the Netherlands, which is the fact that the Act grants the US President all means necessary – the option of using all means necessary – to bring about the release of any US personnel being detained by the International Criminal Court. That is why we in the Netherlands know the Act as the ‘Hague Invasion Act’.
We could make a lot of jokes about this, and indeed we have done, and quite rightly so. That can lead us to underestimate the significance of this all, however. This Act was an extremely antagonistic and very symbolic reaction on President Bush’s part to the advent of the ICC. What we need now is an equally symbolic but, I hope, very friendly reaction from President Obama. I urge him to revoke this Act and cooperate with the ICC, and I call on the Commission and the Council to also bring this issue to the President’s attention when they meet him next week."@en1
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