2007 ORDINARY SESSION

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(First part)

REPORT

Fourth sitting

Tuesday 23 January 2007 at 3 p.m.

Mr HERKEL (Estonia). – We have a long list of speakers today and several amendments have been tabled – not because the topic covered by the report has not been elaborated on well, but because the report is very important. I saw how long and how hard Marko worked on his report and I congratulate him.

Of course, energy supplies should not be used as an instrument of political pressure, but we should not be naïve. Many political leaders in today’s Russia, even at the very top, did their scientific work and theses on so-called strategic planning and natural resources. I would like to emphasise a wider theoretical problem. The question is, why in countries that are rich with natural resources are there so many difficulties with the protection of human rights and democratic development in general?

Of course, I am not speaking about Norway, where democracy existed before oil was exploited, but contemporary political scientists such as Fareed Zakaria are telling us a simple truth: money that comes too easy makes governments lazy over implementing necessary reforms and the free market economy.

When people do not have economic freedom, most probably they do not have freedom at all. Sometimes, they have only very old-fashioned imperialistic ideas. We must be very careful with expressions such as “sovereign democracy” or “managed democracy”, which sometimes are used in certain countries. I opened the “Index of Economic Freedom”, which is a product of the Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street Journal, to check how the main producers and transmitters of oil and gas are ranked. These are some of the rankings: Georgia, 35; Moldova, 81; Azerbaijan, 107; Russia, 120; and, the saddest ranking, Ukraine, 125.

There are no data for Belarus, which of course is not free, and all the new members of the European Union are relatively well placed.

Economic freedom is only one side of the coin. We must avoid less free countries using gas and oil to try to destroy the efforts of their neighbours to build up freedom and democracy.

During this part-session, once again we have not debated the tensions between Russia and Georgia. One of the main tasks of Europe today must be to assist countries such as Georgia and Moldova in their efforts to build up democracy and to avoid unfair economic and political pressure.

Europe needs success stories. And, last but not least, we also need a strong common energy strategy so as to have as many alternatives as possible.