Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2011-09-26-Speech-1-164-000"
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"en.20110926.20.1-164-000"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, the changing situation in the Basque Country leads me once again to alert Parliament to the worrying behaviour for European democracy of one of the Member States, namely Spain.
In May, it required a last-minute appeal decision, passed by only 1 vote, by Spain’s constitutional court to allow the Basque independence movement Bildu’s list of candidates to stand in the local elections. The fact is, those candidates received 25% of the vote. The attempt to ban them was therefore an attempt to undermine the democratic expression of the Basque people, which is wholly unacceptable and even inconceivable at the very heart of the European Union.
Then, in July, I personally attended a hearing in the trial of Mr Otegi, the leader of the left-wing Basque independence movement, and several of his friends. In reality, they were being prosecuted for thought crimes; the court has just handed them the maximum sentence of 10 years’ imprisonment, a sentence that is wholly disproportionate, deliberately excessive and which has shocked all of democratic society, both in the Basque Country and in Madrid.
The European Parliament must voice its disapproval of the Spanish Government’s policy towards the Basque Country, at the very time when the political developments are such that a peace process of the Northern Ireland kind could result in a long-term political solution that benefits the Basques, the citizens of Spain themselves and all the citizens of Europe."@en1
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