Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2012-05-22-Speech-2-077-000"
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"en.20120522.5.2-077-000"2
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"Mr President, it is clearly no longer fashionable to measure everyone, including the most senior statesmen, by the same yardstick. The various corruption scandals in EU countries do not bother us in the slightest. It is only exceptionally that a former statesman is convicted, as was recently the case with French President Chirac. Some EU states offer political asylum to fraudsters and, at the same time, try to put pressure on neighbouring countries to provide special privileges to former top politicians, contrary to the principles of equal treatment.
I am not a big football fan, but the tendency to link the European football tournament in Ukraine with the sentencing of former premier, Yulia Tymoshenko, has come as an unpleasant surprise. It is a fact that I have been trying for years to get more young women into top-level politics. It does not follow from this in any way, of course, that I would approve special conditions for privileged prisoners to serve out their punishments and special forms of treatment, in a country with several million people unemployed and homeless. Such an approach from politicians on the right does not surprise me. They have long been pushing for debts caused by the banks to be paid off by reducing the social standards of the poorest, even at the cost of high unemployment and dismantling the social state.
I would like to make noisy protest against the European Parliament exporting such behaviour – including impunity for large-scale fraudsters – to countries outside the EU. In the case of Yulia Tymoshenko and people connected with her, some of the proposals violate the principle of equal treatment for citizens. It is not possible to grant political asylum to the fraudsters we call oligarchs in Eastern Europe, and then to hold a noisy debate about economic sanctions against those who are trying to rid themselves of the worst forms of corruption.
I propose, ladies and gentlemen, that we put our own house in order first. I would like to recommend in particular that MEPs from the so-called new EU states acquaint us with the anti-corruption measures recently adopted in their own countries. Only then would I like to hear their views on the situation in Ukraine. It is not only football, but also politics that must finally start to acknowledge the rules of fair play."@en1
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