Mr President, human rights are not something we have simply pulled out of the ether, nor have we taken them from party manifestos. They are universal, that is to say indivisible and independent of countries and parties. They are concerned not with opinions but with actions. They provide protection against injustice and discrimination. They should be clear and comprehensible and not consist of idle talk. We are to build upon firm ground when we talk of human rights, and we should therefore especially build upon those conventions to which the countries concerned have acceded and upon the legal practice which the Council of Europe’s Court of Human Rights has developed in such a distinguished way since the Second World War. The EU should not be changing or reinventing things. Instead, the EU should have the status of a legal person, it should accede to the human rights conventions and, in that way, guarantee that human rights are respected, including in countries where the EU has jurisdiction. The aforesaid legal practice is not static. Fortunately, it is developing the whole time. Think of the latest judgement on homosexual equality, which has caused Great Britain to change its legislation, and the same will hopefully happen soon in Austria. I also hope that there will soon be a judgement ensuring that citizens are not only entitled to form trade unions but also to be free to join them. The conventions too are constantly being supplemented. We have obtained conventions on bio-ethics and on the protection of personal data and private life, but I should especially like today to draw your attention to two new conventions from 1995 and 1998 concerning national minorities. I think that Bosnia and Kosovo have taught us all that national minorities constitute the most potentially explosive factor in the Europe of the future. We must demand of the candidate States, including Turkey, that, if they want to be a part of the Community, they have to guarantee that national minorities are able to lead their daily lives in peace, using the language they have always spoken in the area concerned. The new Member States should not only comply with these requirements at the present time. They should also guarantee that they will do so in the future and should therefore sign and ratify the conventions, as they would also wish to do, if they have not already done so. But so too must the present Member States. Let us therefore urgently entreat those countries which have not ratified these conventions on national minorities to see to it that this is done straight away. After five years, two Member States have still not signed the Convention for the Protection of National Minorities. They are Belgium and France which otherwise, of course, show such a keen interest in the situations in other countries. Now, I think, they should put matters in order in their own countries and get these conventions signed. The demands we impose upon others we must also impose upon ourselves. We must say to all fifteen governments: go home and get the conventions signed and ratified. Remember, too, the Charter for Regional and Minority Languages and remember the Convention for the International War Crimes Tribunal, which only Italy has ratified. We must all ratify this, for the only means of combating the vicious circle of revenge and people’s taking the law into their own hands is to have war criminals brought to justice and sentenced. I also want to mention the Convention against Torture, which Ireland has still not ratified. Likewise, Belgium, Ireland and Great Britain have yet to recognise the United Nations Committee Against Torture as being competent to deal with individual complaints. I could talk at length, partly about the conditions to which asylum seekers are subject in our Member States. If only half of what is stated in the reports by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch is correct, then the situation regarding the treatment of asylum seekers is indefensible. I could also mention children’s rights, which are a huge problem, including in a number of candidate States. I could mention the continued discrimination against handicapped people, and I should also like to emphasise, further to Cecilia Malmström’s speech, that, when it comes to women’s equality, we constantly fall short, in the Union’s Member States too. Finally, I want to say that we should perhaps have certain new tools for monitoring human rights, and I would point out that, when it comes to national minorities, it would perhaps be an idea if, in conjunction with the Monitoring Centre for Racism and Xenophobia in Vienna, we were also to have the treatment of national minority languages monitored. I would also mention my proposal that we should have a supervisory body responsible for monitoring effectively the protection of personal data and the right to private life. Technology is developing and so too, therefore, must our instruments for the protection of human rights. (Applause)

Political group: ELDR