European Parliament: plenary session - Strasbourg, EP, 11 March

Approval of the Agenda: Chechnya

President - I have received two requests concerning urgent matters. The first is a request from the PPE-DE group and the PSE group to cancel the item "Situation in Chechnya".

Poettering (PPE-DE) - Mr. President! To simplify the procedure: our group is very committed to the question of Chechnya, and if we join the request to suspend the matter from the agenda of this session, it does not mean that we will not remain committed to the question. We want to wait for the visit of the European Parliament delegation to Moscow before returning to this issue in an in-depth debate, in May at the latest. I would like to repeat this explicitly. We remain committed and our attention is turned to Chechnya. If we are in favour of suspending the question from the agenda, this does not mean that we are reducing our commitment.

Dupuis (NI). Mr. President, I would like to thank you first of all for having phoned me, two weeks ago, when I was on the third day of my hunger strike for Chechnya. I have now reached the eighteenth day. I think that the reasons given by Mr. Poettering do not hold up. I think that our Parliament is hostage to one or two Stalinists who are always strong with the weak and weak with the strong. The reason for removing this resolution on Chechnya from the agenda is that the delegation with Russia has to visit Moscow to meet the Russian members of the delegation. I think that the delegation should go to Moscow with an extremely precise, strong stance on a situation that has lasted two and a half years, that has seen 150,000 deaths and 400,000 refugees out of a population of one million. So I call on my Socialist friends... there is only Mr. Sakellariou from the Socialist group. I call on my friends in the PPE not to postpone indefinitely a tragedy which is happening right now... and not tomorrow.

Sakellariou (PSE) - Mr. President! I would like to tell Mr. Poettering that I am in complete agreement with the proposal he has made. I think that if we want to have a real debate on Chechnya, we must not do so in the ambit of urgent matters, with one or two minutes speaking time, but in the ambit of a statement from the Council and the Commission on the issue, the basis for a serious discussion. Apart from this, I do not wish to reply to the repeated attacks from Mr. Dupuis and his acolytes, like Mr. Pannella, for example, as well as several other exemplars.

Frassoni (Greens/ALE) - Mr. President, I think that the fact of saying that if the matter is not urgent then we can find another way constitutes a fundamental problem, because every time this argument is used, then - who knows why? - the relevant committees do nothing about it. It seems to me that it is very important that this urgent matter, agreed on previously by the groups, should be dealt with in this session, when among other things a number of groups are undertaking initiatives on Chechnya, and exactly as 400 or 500 people are planning a hunger strike for Chechnya. I do not believe that not discussing the issue now as an urgent matter means that we will have another opportunity to discuss it in a month or two. If this were the case, we might agree with the proposal, but unfortunately the precedents do not suggest that this is what will happen, which is why I would ask the Socialist group and the PPE group to stick to the commitment they made last week.

Poettering (PPE-DE). - Mr. President, I want to make one thing clear: in reality my group did not want to remove this point from the agenda and our information was that it was the Socialist group that had made this request, to which we said, all right (uproar in the chamber) Listen to me! I listen to you when you are speaking! So we said: to have a wide majority on the question and to remain committed on the subject we are in favour of cancelling the item from the agenda of this session, and of finding, in the immediate future, a procedure to deal with the question in the most fitting manner, perhaps also in the presence of the Council and the Commission. Only on this basis are we in favour of not dealing with the question in this session in the ambit of urgent matters, but at a later date in a much more suitable form. This is our condition.

(Parliament approves the request)