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CIA extraordinary rendition in Europe
February 14, 2007 12:00 AM
By Baroness Sarah Ludford MEP in European Parliament
By Baroness Sarah Ludford MEP in European Parliament
Mr President, touching as it is to hear Conservative Mr Helmer defend the Labour Government, those who collaborate in refusing to face the facts on the grounds that an inquiry is anti-American will have red faces when the heavy guns in Congress turn their energies to this topic.
European Commission President Barroso, who of course comes from the PPE-DE Group, the centre-right, wants the themes of accountability and promoting Europe's values in the world to figure alongside security in the Berlin Declaration marking the EU's 50th birthday in March.
This serious and professional report, for which I thank Mr Fava, the committee chairman Mr Coelho and all the staff, is about accountability for human rights abuses which European governments did collude in or allowed to happen on their territory. It is about security, but built within a framework of law in which the security not to end up as a tortured ghost detainee counts too and it is certainly about promoting Europe's values in the world, the ones of democracy, human rights and the rule of law to which Member States signed up in the Treaty.
I agree with US Defence Secretary, Robert Gates, speaking at the recent Munich Security Conference about the West's defeat of totalitarianism in the 20th century and our opposition to extremist ideologies now. He said: 'Our most effective weapon, then and now, has been Europe's and North America's shared belief in political and economic freedom, religious toleration, human rights, representative government and the rule of law. Those values kept our side united'. Indeed, so why has the Bush Administration - not Americans as a whole - tossed away the moral high ground and dragged America's reputation into the mud by a programme of kidnapping, forced disappearance, dark prisons, indefinite detention, cruel and inhuman treatment and outsourcing of torture? As Barack Obama has said, what the US needs is not to be feared, but to be respected.
I do not rejoice in the fact that the latest survey of global opinion finds an antagonism to America at an intense pitch. Even in Poland, fewer than four out of ten have a mainly positive view of the US.
Europe has failed a test in the last five years, a test of whether it will practise its values or only preach them. We have lacked the guts to refuse to collude with torture flights and lacked the vision to use Europe's capacity to be a real and united best friend to America, and it is about time that we actually practised those values.
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