Nieuws van de afdeling

6 June 2013

Syria demands realism, not moralism

‘Civil war is the worst kind of war there is. People who just lived side by side together up until then turn things into a battleground.’ I often heard my mother say this. I suspect that she gained this wisdom from the reports that must have reached her between 1936 and 1939 about the Spanish Civil War. In recent decades we have seen how ‘the worst’ can turn out: Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda, Congo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Egypt, and now Syria.

4 June 2013

Van Bommel: ‘Violence against Turkish demonstrators is unacceptable’

SP Member of Parliament Harry van Bommel is calling on Minister for Foreign Affairs Frans Timmermans to call Turkey to account over the excessive violence used against demonstrators and to urge restraint. ‘Human rights organisations are right to criticise the extraordinary levels of violence that followed the huge, overwhelmingly peaceful demonstrations which have taken place in Turkey,’ says Van Bommel. ‘It is of enormous importance that the Netherlands make its concerns over this known.’

1 June 2013

'Action now on Armenia and Azerbaijan' says Council of Europe

Twenty-five years after the bloody war over Nagorno Karabach, Armenia and Azerbaijan, as current and next holders of the Council of Europe’s rotating six-month presidency, must make extra efforts to arrive at a peaceful settlement of this dangerous conflict. This call, an initiative of SP Senator Tiny Kox, was issued this week by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), in which are represented forty-seven European states.

1 June 2013

Council of Europe demands humane prisons policy

The existence of overcrowded prisons in many European countries represents a transgression of human rights.

31 May 2013

Taboo-breaking meeting on EU officials held at European Parliament

Feelings ran high during today’s meeting on European officials organised by the SP. A representative of a Brussels-based union of officials said with a sigh that ‘even if we halved our salaries, the public would still hate us.’ As SP Euro-MP Dennis de Jong points out, ‘everyone at the meeting had to acknowledge that there’s a serious problem – high-earning senior EU officials arouse the anger of the public. At the same time there has been in recent years no fundamental discussion of what kind of EU administrative apparatus is necessary. Today that’s finally been put on to the agenda.’

30 May 2013

Fraudulent bills must be tackled at EU level

Large numbers of businesses are plagues by fraudulent bills sent by criminals looking to extract money for sham products or services. In the Netherlands the organisation of smaller firms, MKB-Nederland, has been cooperating with the NGO ‘Steunpunt Acquisitiefraude’ (literally, ‘support point acquisition fraud’) to combat these practices. Steupoint Acquisitiefraude describes itself as a foundation which offers participants legal assistance and preventive advice on various kinds of fraud. SP Euro-MP Dennis de Jong explains that this service, though valuable, is limited because ‘many of these fraudulent bills are sent from outside the country. For this reason EU member states need to improve their cooperation in order to address the problem via a reporting point for each country. That’s not only important for the firms who would know whose door to knock on, as a central reporting point for each country would mean also that these could more easily share data and successful working methods.’

International