Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2013-01-16-Speech-3-507-000"
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"en.20130116.40.3-507-000"2
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"Mr President, this is indeed an appalling situation. For those of us who give the lion’s share of our time here to development issues and to African, Caribbean and Pacific Assembly issues, it really comes as a shock to see that, despite the efforts we are making, people are working and losing their lives in these conditions.
But I am really a bit perturbed to hear people get up here wringing their hands, saying how shocking it is and always condemning somebody else – usually large companies. Not all companies are unethical. But in our Member States, when we seek to raise taxes to pay for our commitments in the public sector – including our 0.7% of GNI – the very same people campaign against paying these taxes – ‘Do not pay your water rates, do not pay your bin charges, do not pay property taxes’ – and then they come and ask why the governments of the day are not meeting their commitments.
The garment sector is the largest export market for Bangladesh, amounting annually to about EUR 15.3 billion. What are these people to do? What are they to do if we will not come to their assistance? Here we are again in the MFF, looking at the humanitarian aid budget and the development budget and prevaricating about whether we are going to meet the commitments we have already entered into.
I think – as the rapporteur for the existing DCI – that, as we now negotiate the new DCI, it is time that we perhaps looked at some form of random auditing of the standards in these workplaces. There is no reason why we cannot provide for that in our legislation. I understand that, in the four weeks since the Tazreen fire in Bangladesh, there have been reports of 17 other outbreaks of fire in textile and garment factories. This is something that we should be very concerned about and should build into our development cooperation instrument in order to empower ourselves to somehow audit the sort of standards that a lot of companies located in Europe are – perhaps blindly – allowing to continue."@en1
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