Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2009-04-23-Speech-4-388"
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"en.20090423.65.4-388"2
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"Madam President, it is almost 15 years since the end of the war in Bosnia and almost exactly ten years since NATO’s bombing campaign forced Serbian forces to leave Kosovo. In December, it will also be 17 years since I, myself, came to Sweden as a refugee from the war that set my former homeland alight and made bitter enemies of the Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs who had previously lived together as neighbours. The fact that neither Bosnia, Kosovo nor any of the other countries in the Western Balkans has relapsed into war since then is entirely down to the EU and NATO. However, even though the weapons have fallen silent, the legacy of the war lives on in politics and society in the region. The only chance for people in these countries to overcome their past is for them to continue along the path towards EU membership. Only the carrot and the stick that constitute the key dynamics of the accession process can get the governments of these countries to focus on carrying out the work and the reforms which, once and for all, can consolidate stability and prosperity in the Western Balkans.
In the report that I have written on this subject, and which the European Parliament will vote on tomorrow, I examine the various initiatives and projects that the EU and its Member States are involved in in one way or another in order to attempt to develop societies that are prepared to meet the stringent requirements of EU membership. I do not intend to go into the details of the report here, but there are two things in particular that I would like to highlight.
The first is that there is a fundamental difference between the countries currently involved in the enlargement process and those which acceded in 2004 or 2007. The countries of the Western Balkans were ravaged by full-scale war and ethnic cleansing little more than a decade ago. Fortunately, the same cannot be said of Hungary, Estonia or Romania. However, this means that the EU cannot simply copy the handbook from previous enlargements and apply it to the Balkans. An example of this that I mention in my report relates to the prohibition on the extradition of suspected criminals facing indictment in other countries. Such prohibitions are currently in force in all of the Balkan countries, but the EU is currently making no demands for their abolition. The justification for this is that no similar demands were made of Slovakia or Poland, for example. It should be obvious why this analogy is not valid. I would think that there are extremely few suspected war criminals hiding from justice in Slovakia, but I can tell you that there are considerably more in Serbia and Bosnia. Justice is the basis on which reconciliation can be built. Impunity for war criminals is completely unacceptable, and I therefore wish to urge the Commission and the Member States to once again raise the issue of the possibility of getting the countries in the region to take steps towards a coordinated abolition of these prohibitions.
The second matter I would like to highlight is that the accession process is, as I have mentioned, very stringent and demanding – and so it should be. If we do not make stringent demands and insist on them being met in full we will not actually achieve any real results. When the requirements are already so stringent and difficult to meet, the last thing we should do is to throw more spanners in the works for those countries who wish to become members, spanners that have nothing to do with the ability of those countries to meet the EU’s membership criteria.
I am also thinking about those who claim that the EU is already full and that it cannot, for the foreseeable future, accept any more members. Although, as I point out in my report, it would, technically speaking, be perfectly possible to continue to accept new Member States, even if the Treaty of Lisbon were not to enter into force, doing so requires political will, and it is this that it is my job and that of my fellow Members here in Parliament to create."@en1
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