Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2011-11-17-Speech-4-160-000"
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"en.20111117.17.4-160-000"2
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"Mr President, the past 20 years have witnessed a juridical revolution. It has been carried out stealthily in plush conference venues, out from under the private eye, but it is a revolution. It has shifted power permanently and substantively away from elected national representatives to a global corpus of lawyers and human rights activists.
The tried and clearly understood precept that we have had since the Treaty of Westphalia – the idea that every state is responsible for its domestic affairs and that crimes are the responsibility of the state on whose territory they were committed – has been cast aside not only for cross-border issues, but also for domestic questions: gender equality, the rights of minorities, labour laws and so on.
One might say, well how else are we going to bring to trial the Al-Bashirs and the Miloševićs and the Gaddafis and so on, but here one runs up against the brute reality: dictators ignore these conventions. They are applied only by liberal democracies.
Thus, having spent 300 years in Europe clawing our slow and gruelling way towards the principle that laws ought to be made only by the people’s elected representatives, we are now, in a fit of absent-mindedness, discarding it."@en1
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The resource appears as object in 2 triples