Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2009-10-08-Speech-4-035"
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"en.20091008.5.4-035"2
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"Mr President, I see that, fortunately, I am not the only one who very much questions this rather absurd initiative, the apparent purpose of which is to brand Italy a country where freedom of information is fundamentally under threat. Evidently, the socialists have quite a few problems with there being at least one European Member State where the politically correct left does not yet control all the newspapers and all the media. Berlusconi’s Italy – and I am choosing my words carefully, as I have no dealings with the man – is a model of freedom, freedom of expression and press diversity compared to many other European countries.
Our fellow Member, Mr Verhofstadt, who has just launched a merciless attack on Mr Berlusconi in this House, is famous, or rather infamous, in his own country – my country – for his threats and personal intervention when journalists criticised his government; and this just recently. He is probably the very last person who should be speaking about this. What I should have liked to see from the Commission was an initiative to restore freedom of expression and information in all European Member States wherever these are under very real threat from freedom-killing legislation, often on the pretext of supposedly combating racism. Or how about a Commission initiative when, for example – as also happened just recently – a Dutch politician cannot even obtain permission to enter another European Member State, the United Kingdom. I could also cite the very recent example of my own country where my party, Vlaams Belang, the second largest party in Flanders, suffers discrimination at the hands of the taxpayer-funded public broadcaster; discrimination that, just recently, was described as electoral misrepresentation by Belgium’s highest legal body, the State Council. It is true that there are many problems with freedom of information in Europe but they are, by no means, all taking place in Berlusconi’s Italy; the reverse is true."@en1
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