Brussels, 13/03/2012 (Agence Europe) - Elected representatives at the European Parliament in Strasbourg on Tuesday 13 March called on the government of Mark Rutte to condemn the initiative of its ally the PVV (Partij voor de Vrijheid) of Gert Wilders in launching a website calling on Dutch people to lodge their complaints about immigrants from Eastern Europe. They will restate this position on 15 March when they adopt a joint resolution condemning the PVV hotline.
The political groups had planned to hold a special debate on this issue and the EPP had even invited Rutte to present his side of things. MEPs had to make do with discussing the matter with European Commissioner Viviane Reding and Danish Secretary for European Affairs Nicolai Wammen, Prime Minister Rutte having scuppered the whole event, stating that he had been detained in the Netherlands by discussions on the budget deficit.
A regrettable “empty chair policy”, said the EPP Group's French leader Joseph Daul but “what I regret most is that the government refuses to distance itself from a racist, violent and dishonest site”, he went on to say. Racism and discrimination are serious matters, Daul said, but “clearly not sufficiently so for Mr Rutte to discuss them”.
S&D Group leader Hannes Swoboda, too, said that Rutte had to respond to the PVV initiative, as the two had “got into bed together”. Rutte's silence this far “is not acceptable”, Swoboda went on. There has to be “clear distancing, unequivocal condemnation. … Say at least that you are against racism and discrimination”, Swoboda told the absent Rutte. The Austrian Socialist leader also slammed the other consequence of the alliance between the government and the PVV which is the veto on the accession to the Schengen area. “Which country is still blocking this enlargement? The Netherlands … what a coincidence!”
Adopting the line he has taken throughout, ALDE leader Belgian Guy Verhofstadt repeated his group's scorn for initiatives of this sort and said, too, that it was “unacceptable” that the Rutte government has not made any comment. He wanted to look further than this incident, however, and argued that the European Parliament owed it to itself to condemn all slides towards racism and discrimination in the EU, including the comments by French President and presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy on the Schengen area. “When I see Sarkozy say that half the immigrants have to be put out … and endanger Schengen, this too is a way of speaking and behaving that must not be accepted.” He took the opportunity to tell the EPP that it should look at itself first before criticising others.
For the Commission, Reding noted that the PVV site was the antithesis of all European values. She called on the Dutch authorities to give due consideration to the legality of the site and to whether it complies with the framework directives on tackling racism and xenophobia. She again said that those who wish to lodge complaints should first turn to national courts. The Commission, she said, could not take the place of national judges' rulings.
Wammen, for the Council, did not, of course, criticise Rutte but noted that “non-discrimination” was a fundamental principle, “part of our European DNA”, and that freedom of expression does not confer freedom “to say everything and anything”. He called on all member states to apply this principle of non-discrimination and said that what holds for discrimination also holds for crossing borders. (SP/transl.rt)