Speech by Graham Watson MEP at the October I plenary session on the informal EU summit of Lahti, EU-Russian relations and the assassination of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaïa

Speech delivered on Wed 11th Oct 2006

Graham Watson, on behalf of the ALDE Group. - Mr President, Madam President-in-Office, Liberals and Democrats wish you well for Lahti. A Presidency in the second half of the year is never easy, and informal talks with 25 Heads of Government round a table are difficult to imagine. I bet you cannot even fit them all into one sauna!

On your agenda there will be important matters as diverse as energy, innovation and migration, although, as you say, the real story will be entertaining the President of the Russian Federation. We believe that the Member States must stand foursquare behind the Union flag in condemning attacks on freedom and private property in a country where one more candle of independent thought has just been extinguished. Mr Putin has clearly studied Machiavelli's dictum: 'Princes who have achieved great things have been those who have given their word lightly, who have known how to trick men with their cunning and who have overcome those abiding by honest principles.' While President Putin concedes that his country is tarnished by the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, he fails to add that 40 other journalists have been murdered in his country in recent years.

(Applause)

Liberals and Democrats pay tribute to Anna Politkovskaya. Among her criticisms of the state of freedom and democracy in Russia, she wrote, in a book called Putin's Russia: Life in a failing democracy, 'Yes, stability has come to Russia. It is a monstrous stability under which nobody seeks justice in law courts, which flaunt their subservience and partisanship, nobody in his or her right mind seeks protection from the institutions entrusted with maintaining law and order because they are totally corrupt. Lynch law is the order of the day. The President himself,' she continues, 'has set an example by wrecking our major oil company, YUKOS, after having jailed its chief executive, Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Putin considered Khodorkovsky to have slighted him personally, so he retaliated.'

Madam President-in-Office, Russia needs the European Union just as much as the European Union needs Russia. They need our market for oil and gas. We are their biggest customer. So let our Heads of State and Government talk to Mr Putin about oil and gas, but do not have them mince their words about an increasingly dictatorial regime. Let them also prepare for life without dependency on Russia through joined-up thinking on energy and the environment. In a week in which Al Gore has promoted his film on the 'inconvenient truth' of climate change, our energy policy must in any case reflect an urgent need for a change of direction.

Lahti is a follow-up to Hampton Court a year ago, where leaders approved plans to create a European energy market, raise competitiveness and educational levels and tackle the growing pressure of migration. In the past 12 months, the urgency for action in all those areas has increased. The Commission has rightly identified the needs, but Member States continue to deny the means. The Commission proposes a genuine internal market in energy, unbundling networks as we did with telecoms, creating an observatory to monitor stocks, developing a more sustainable energy mix, making energy savings. We welcome these proposals, but we need the Council to get on with them. Mr Barroso wants a European institute for technology. Get on with it, if you can raise the money! Migration is presented, on the one hand, with data showing we need to encourage migration of labour and skills, and, on the other, with media headlines stoking populist fears of uninvited guest workers taking away jobs and benefits. It is time for honesty and integrity in this debate, time for our leaders to face down their critics with the facts and not the fiction.

To succeed, the Council must act effectively, for which they need the provisions of the Article 43 'bridging clause'. I hope the Finnish Presidency will continue to press for this. We support the Finnish Presidency and its modest and pragmatic approach to EU business. However, Madam President-in-Office, we fear you are being eclipsed already by the forthcoming German Presidency. Issues are being postponed; foreign leaders are courting Mrs Merkel. The German Foreign Ministry is taking the lead. Let us not raise too high expectations of what Germany can deliver, nor lower our expectations of what the Finnish Presidency can achieve. The Presidency needs to show that, in the words of the Monty Python song, 'Finland has it all'!