International

‘The Turkish parliamentary elections on 7th June promise to be exceptionally tense and exciting. The ruling AK Party is attempting to win a two-thirds majority, while the left Kurdish party is doing its best to get above the extremely high electoral threshold of 10% and social democrats and nationalists are shouting about how they’re going to put an end to the dominance of the governing party, whose founder Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is now Turkey’s President.’ So says SP Senator Tiny Kox, who heads an international team of observers from the Council of Europe. Days after the election he will be in Ankara to present the observation’s findings.

The SP’s new agenda for development cooperation will appear shortly. Five subjects will occupy centre-stage in this statement: emergencies, health care, youth, money and ‘green’ - the environment. SP Member of Parliament Eric Smaling and SP official Ben van Gils lay out the new agenda step by step.

Today the European Parliament External Trade Committee voted on sections of the trade and investment treaty currently being negotiated between the EU and the United States. Despite massive social resistance to the establishment of the Investor-State Dispute Settlement system (ISDS), the Trade Committee voted in principle to support the ISDS. The fact that the social democrats voted to back the controversial system was in particular a painful aspect for the SP. In two weeks’ time the resolution will be voted on by the entire Parliament.

The European Commission today presented its proposals for binding European legislation on the relocation of asylum seekers away from Italy and Greece to other EU member states. The SP shares the wish to see more solidarity amongst the member states, but criticises the current proposal for its lack of balance. SP Euro-MP Dennis de Jong, responding to the proposal, said, “With the criteria which the Commission applies the main thing is the number of inhabitants in each member state and their standard of living. Yet the number of inhabitants in itself tells you nothing about a country’s capacity to accommodate asylum seekers if the geographic size of the state in question isn’t taken into account. I don’t expect the member states will find the present criteria acceptable either.’

On Saturday afternoon a demonstration took place in Amsterdam against the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, a proposed treaty between the European Union and the United States which will undermine social standards and curtail democrpatic rights. The SP was represented at the demonstration and SP Member of Parliament Jasper van Dijk was amongst those who addressed the crowd gathered on Amsterdam’s Beursplein. This is an extended summary of what he said:

Now that tension is rapidly rising in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, the international community will have to be careful not to repeat the mistake of attempting to impose solutions from outside of the country. It’s up to the citizens and government of Macedonia to put an end to the political chaos and prevent a violent escalation. On an initiative of the political group led by SP Senator Tiny Kox, the United European Left, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) this week met in Sarajevo to hold extensive talks about the serious political disruption afflicting Council of Europe member state Macedonia.

The European Parliament is to introduce compulsory certification for the import of raw materials from war zones. This will mean that importers will be required to declare that the raw materials in question were mined in a responsible manner. The SP is delighted that the Parliament defied a fierce lobby and voted to approve a compulsory certification system.

Foto: SP

This week SP parliamentary foreign affairs spokesman Harry van Bommel is in Armenia at the head of a Dutch delegation. Prior to the visit, he wrote the following piece about the relationship between the EU and Armenia, and the opportunities offered by the future. His article was published in an Armenian newspaper and is reproduced in translation below.

The European Commission today presented the new European Migration Agenda. The SP’s European Parliament group is unimpressed, as group chair Dennis de Jong explains.

‘Just beyond the EU’s external frontiers the world is in flames. Every day, people have to be rescued from the Mediterranean Sea. The Commission is still using for this task border guard services whose personnel are specially trained to keep people out. The Commission has, moreover, produced no solution to the problems refugees, and this European Migration Agenda (EMA) is once again contradictory: restrictive when it comes to people in need, and an open immigration policy for the well-educated. This will only increase the number of migrants heading towards Europe.´