Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2011-02-03-Speech-4-010-000"
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"en.20110203.4.4-010-000"2
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"Madam President, a guarantee of human rights, the promotion and development of democratic structures and combating corruption are the central demands of those taking to the streets in Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen – by peaceful means and in the hope of thereby achieving change, so that people in Maghreb and in the Arab world can assert their right to freedom of expression and freedom of the press, their right to free elections and their right to civil participation. The implementation of these rights is precisely what our financing instrument for democracy and human rights wants to promote; up until now, it has had limited opportunities to act in the countries mentioned because the circumstances there are such that in general, those who were of a different opinion could expect persecution and torture.
I very much welcome the fact that, as we heard yesterday in the working party, the Commission has already made detailed plans to use the financing instrument in such a way that there will now be short-term, medium-term and long-term projects, which can now be used to support the democratic transformation in Tunisia. It would be good if in the future we could develop a model from this that can also be used should such a fundamental transformation come about in other states. I very much hope that the Commission will take up the suggestions made by the parliamentary delegation to Tunisia, such as on reform of the judiciary.
The instrument for the promotion of democracy and human rights is structured in such a way as to be able to support those in the different civil structures who are working for improvements in the human rights situation. This could be governments, it could be international human rights institutions or it could be individuals who need support as defenders of human rights. Overall, it is a good structure precisely because it makes it possible in certain situations to act without the consent of the government concerned. I do not see this in any way as interfering in internal affairs, because it is in the nature of human rights that we need to be able to resist state compulsion and state violence against the population – against the individual citizen.
Naturally, we need to review the individual projects, as well as the priorities of the human rights and democracy instrument, and subject these to continual critical evaluation. Until now the instrument was still relatively new, so there was no point in carrying out an evaluation that would tell us little. It is thus all the more important that we now prepare and implement the forthcoming comprehensive evaluation. The aim must be to clarify the effects of individual measures and to allow us to rethink priorities and working methods where relevant.
This financing instrument shares the basic principle that there should be complementarity between all financing instruments. Yet we repeatedly find in practice that this relatively modest financial instrument is being used to fund projects that could be clearly linked to a geographical instrument. This issue also arises in the case of human rights dialogues. For this reason we should definitely not agree to any cuts in this modest instrument and we must also see that it is not used to fund projects for which it is not in fact appropriate.
Finally, regarding the delegated acts – a matter on which we have yet to reach agreement for any of the financing instruments. In many policy areas, such as the environment and transport, there is no dispute as to what may be regarded as delegated acts. In foreign policy, however, this is seen as highly contentious. It is very important, however – particularly post the Treaty of Lisbon – that we as Parliament also have codecision rights in foreign policy, at the level of the strategic focus of financing instrument programmes."@en1
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