Mr. Stavros Lambrinidis:

I thank the Chairman and members of the committee for inviting me to address them. If I slip sometimes into calling them dear colleagues it will be due to my European Parliament Vice President days. I apologise in advance if I do so. It is great privilege that the committee opened its doors to me for this exchange of views. It is also an opportunity for me to congratulate Ireland at a time when it is in the midst of human rights debates. It was no small feat to be elected to the Human Rights Council and Ireland is also chairing the European Council. However, Ireland's election to the Human Rights Council and the Nobel Peace Prize that the EU was awarded some months ago are just the beginning of a process because both Ireland and the EU more broadly must prove that we deserve the honours we have received.

Many people around the world look to us with great expectations. That includes those who look to my position with great expectations. My position was the result of major debate within the EU and, in my view, the peaceful revolution in human rights which occurred in June and July 2012. The EU decided unanimously to adopt a new strategic framework for human rights in which the highest common denominator was achieved, as opposed to the lowest which people might expect when the EU speaks with one voice. In every EU policy, whether in trade, development, the environment or counter terrorism, member states committed to putting human rights as the silver thread guiding action, always speaking out when human rights violations occur and working closely with international multilateral organisations and each other to achieve our goals. An action plan was unanimously approved which sets out 97 actions to be implemented in a number of areas and particular human rights themes over the next three years, with specific deadlines and specific people, institutions and member states made responsible for them.

The decision was also made as part of this peaceful revolution to appoint a Special Representative for Human Rights, and I was deeply honoured to be selected for the post by Catherine Ashton and member states. My mandate reflects what the EU considered to be the challenges facing the new policy. I am tasked with increasing the coherence and effectiveness of human rights policy.

I am also tasked with increasing the visibility of EU human rights policy. Coherence, effectiveness and visibility are the aims. My mandate is not in respect of member states but is directed towards the EU's foreign policy. If one considers each requirement, one can see what a major challenge this is. Coherence means that everyone who does human rights in the EU today - rather successfully in many cases - must try to work more closely together to make the EU's punch more effective. A number of European Commissioners have a human rights role with, in some cases, large budgets to deal with neighbourhood policy, enlargement or immigration. The external actions service has more than 150 delegations internationally to conduct the EU's foreign policy, including its human rights policy. A number of member states are extremely active on human rights through their own embassies, missions and foreign policy establishments. Ireland is, obviously, among them being extremely active on the ground in many countries. There is a need for co-ordination in that regard. The European Parliament has a remarkable political persuasion on human rights matters and is very active around the world through its resolutions, decisions and visits, which can also affect policy. Ensuring all of these strands work well together is one of the elements of my mandate - the cohesion element.

The second element of my mandate concerns effectiveness, about which there is a lot to be said. I may skip it in the interests of time and respond to any particular queries of members. Something I said to the European Parliament about visibility and effectiveness when I assumed my duties was that there is an obvious tendency for politicians such as myself to focus on visibility, which sounds easier than effectiveness. How is one going to change human rights around the world and make people's lives better in countries that so openly violate those rights? While I place some emphasis on visibility, I do not intend to increase the perception of the effectiveness of our policy by focusing on its visibility. As tempting as that might appear to be, I hope instead to increase visibility by increasing the effectiveness. It requires an ant's work on my part. I am fully aware of the difficulties but if human rights are to work, I must ensure that in two years' time when my mandate is over, the EU does not need a special representative to ensure the geographic desks talk to the human rights desks in the external actions service. I must ensure that the Commission people who work on development policy speak to the human rights people and embassies on the ground to ensure they co-ordinate to take human rights into account. To make all this work requires very careful effort behind the scenes. One cannot put out press releases and make triumphant announcements. If one is successful, one will make oneself irrelevant, which is a huge advancement for human rights in the EU and around the world. Of course, it is not enough. One must also interact with a number of countries which violate human rights. Some countries would be willing to receive EU assistance to reduce some of their violations while others, confusingly, have a troubling domestic record but a very hopeful record in multilateral forums on human rights. We must co-operate with all of these very different countries.

In the interests of brevity, I will mention very quickly some of the priorities I am setting. Some claim, given the mandate, that I have been given a boat filled with water. In some ways, my challenge is not to fill the boat, but to take a bucket and start bailing the water out so that it does not sink. My priorities involve countries I am focusing on geographically and thematic focuses. They also involve a focus on certain institutions and major challenges. I will begin with the partners. In the past four months, I hit the ground running by mapping the terrain for the EU and all the human rights players out there. I delivered a statement to the OSCE on the human dimension, visited the UN in New York and met among others, Navi Pillay and a number of UN special rapporteurs on major issues. I have also met UN officials in Geneva. I met the African Union and the Organisation of Islamic Co-operation to discuss a number of topics which I would be more than happy to expand on if members are interested. I also met with the League of Arab States and a number of international organisations, including the International Labour Organisation, which is hugely important for human rights purposes, particularly in countries which have labour issues. I also met with the Red Cross. I intend to develop very close co-operation with the Council of Europe, given the number of non-EU member states in it with which the EU interacts on human rights. I have met with ASEAN countries and others.

In terms of my dealings, I have placed and intend to keep placing a major emphasis on NGOs. Human rights NGOs and civil society organisations, including human rights defenders, are major players. I have met repeatedly with the human rights NGO network in Brussels. I consult with NGOs before every visit and brief them afterwards. It is a practice I encourage everyone to follow when they deal with human rights. It assists NGOs in being informed about what they think. When they are told what was and was not achieved, they can use that information to co-ordinate their actions. In a number of meetings, I have attempted to ensure that NGOs will play an active role. In Mexico, during the human rights dialogue I conducted, I ensured that for the first time there was a parallel EU-Mexico NGO forum in which I and the Mexican Government participated to listen to the NGOs. The EU supported a major forum for Russian and European NGOs in St. Petersburg, at which I spoke. While the president of the Presidential Council for Human Rights in Moscow attended, unfortunately no Russian Government official did.

Our first task force in Egypt was organised by Catherine Ashton in November and attended by a number of Commissioners, EU foreign affairs Ministers and others. With others, I ensured that a parallel NGO round-table discussion on issues including problems for Egyptian NGOs took place on an equal footing with the trade, investment, tourism and business aspects of the exercise. When I conducted the dialogue a month and a half ago with the African Union, we ensured that NGOs were present to debrief both sides in a seminar dealing with the rights to housing and free and fair elections on the African continent. In many ways, increasing the interaction of NGOs with the governments of their own countries is as great a challenge and obligation for an EU Special Representative for Human Rights as providing for EU contact with those NGOs.

What they need most is to have doors opened to their own Governments that often refuse to see them and, in some instances, persecute them and in the worst instances allow, unaccountably, for members of those NGOs to be arrested, detained or killed.

I had a number of contacts, in the context of coherence, with members of the EU institutions, namely a number of EU Commissioners, other non-thematic but geographic European Union special representatives, who are in different regions of the world on the ground every day and have to be co-ordinated, as well as with members of the European Parliament.

I wish to outline to the committee the types of countries that I will be focusing on. I will be focusing on the neighbourhood or, in other words, the countries in which the EU is geographically present and also financially, and otherwise, most able to make a difference. I will be focusing on countries in transition, more broadly, around the world or, in other words, countries that could go one way or the other and in which European soft power, presence and persuasion might be able to make a difference in terms of which way they tilt. I will also be focusing on and meeting the strategic partners of the EU around the world, including Russia, China, Mexico, India and so forth, as well as organisations such as the African Union.

As I see it, there are three or four major human rights challenges ahead of us, both for this committee and for me at the EU level. The first, as I have already mentioned, is the shrinking of the NGO space around the world today. There are many countries, including some where, because of their recent history or the way their democracy was built, one would assume NGOs and civil society organisations would be at the forefront of change and development but where civil society is actually under attack. Such attacks can take many forms and can include making it very difficult for NGOs to be registered or severely restricting their funding. Remarkably, some countries presume that funding coming from the EU, for example, might turn NGOs into foreign agents or traitors to their countries. At the same time, if EU funding goes to hospitals or even to training the police in those same countries, those institutions are not considered to have been corrupted by EU money. It appears that only NGOs are, or can be, corrupted and therefore, they must be forbidden from accepting such money or be persecuted. Intimidation is also a problem in some countries, with concerted campaigns to ridicule human rights defenders or NGOs, to try to make them irrelevant to society or to silence them through a number of laws that have the cumulative effect, whether or not applied, of creating a chilling effect on speech and activity. For us, in the EU, the first major challenge is to devise ways, both direct and indirect, to empower NGOs and to expand the space that is being taken away from them.

The second major human rights challenge is to universality, which is being attacked around the world, from many different quarters and with varying arguments. Those who want to limit women's rights will say that their tradition or religion so commands. Those who want to limit LGBTI rights will say the same. Those who wish to ensure that a "democracy" in their country should be immune from scrutiny for violations will claim that others do not understand them, that they are at a different level of development and must be allowed to be thus. A number of countries around the world, for a variety of reasons, are attacking the universality of human rights.

I feel that the European Union is getting very rusty with its arguments in defence of universality. It is not enough anymore to simply go around pointing out that countries have signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which states that human rights are universal. There has been a return to the argument that universal human rights is an allegedly Western construct that was imposed on a number of countries. We should debate this issue, at a national and European level because we are getting rusty. We ought to be able to answer, convincingly and persuasively, those who challenge the idea of the universality of human rights. In my view, not only are human rights not a Western concept, they are the universal language of the powerless around the world against the cultural relativism of the powerful. One will never hear a woman being beaten up by her husband somewhere saying that she does not want help from Ireland or Europe because her tradition requires that she be beaten up. However, one will most certainly hear her husband say that one has no right to reproach him. One will never hear journalists who were imprisoned for what they said or wrote saying that one has no right to intervene on their behalf because human rights are not universal but one will almost certainly hear governments who like to imprison journalists tell one that one does not understand the issue. It is the powerless and their universal language versus the powerful and their relativism that is really at stake.

I see a red light flashing so I assume I have exceeded the ten minutes allowed. I am trained by my time in the European Parliament and this committee is too generous, given that I usually only have two minutes in that forum. With the Chairman's permission, I will close now on the other two challenges. The third challenge concerns economic and social rights. The European Union does not focus on these rights sufficiently when we speak to others from around the world. People around the world will often say that while they recognise the fact that Europeans focus on civil and political rights, we can do so because we have resolved many economic and social problems. They will say that Europeans have food and shelter while many of their people do not and they want Europe to focus on those issues too. We must do so because we have the expertise, the social safety nets and the knowledge to promote issues such as labour rights, access to health care, education, housing and so forth. These are economic and social rights which we must address and indeed, we do so through development aid but we do not call it human rights aid, although perhaps we should. We should focus on these issues because it increases our credibility in our discussions as people are becoming increasingly resistant to a Europe that appears to be simply pointing its finger and lecturing them.

The final challenge concerns how we conduct our direct contacts, or human rights dialogues, with approximately 40 countries around the world every year. Some of these dialogues have been perceived as being ineffective to date, by NGOs, diplomats and other participants. They ask what we have achieved with China, Russia and other countries with which we conduct dialogues. That is open to debate but we must be much more open in those dialogues. We must continue to point out violations because every country which violates human rights, including civil and political rights, must have Europe as a very annoying and strong critic. We must not water our criticism down when we are in cross-table dialogue but at the same time, we must also think of smart ways to engage with them, especially in multi-lateral fora. Many times we do not do this but we must. The major battles on virtually every topic I have mentioned can be conducted in multi-lateral fora and we can have partners who may not be too good, internally, on some human rights issues with whom we could work multi-laterally. We must also, more broadly, as Europeans respond to criticisms they may have of us too. I do not deal with internal EU human rights matters but whenever I speak to anyone abroad about human rights, at some point the discussion will turn to human rights issues within Europe. I am asked about the Roma, about racism and many other issues. Europe cannot be effective if, in those dialogues, it simply tells countries to direct their questions on possible human rights violations to individual member states. That is no longer dialogue.

I do not believe Europe has anything to be embarrassed about in its human rights records but at the same time I do not believe we are perfect. We should not pretend we are perfect, we are not. We are much better than most people around the world. That is not only because of the value system in place that forces us to be better but also we have the mechanisms to debate, discuss, disagree on and promote the improvement of a fundamental rights record within our countries that are not available in many parts of the world. For seven years the European Parliament criticised the European Commission and member states for violations of fundamental rights that I felt were carried out within Europe. Some might say I was even rewarded for that by getting this position. I certainly was not imprisoned and I was not intimidated. If we could infuse that kind of structure and thinking around the world in countries with whom we disagree on other issues it would be a major success in changing the way they think and approach human rights and, perhaps, to make a difference.