Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I would like the Minister of State to respond to my comments on the shocking double standard of rightly condemning the authoritarian, brutal, murderous and warmongering activities of Putin in Ukraine on the one hand and, on the other, collaborating and having arrangements with regimes that do exactly the same thing. I would like the Minister of State to elaborate on the question of Tunisia, which is mentioned in this document. A number of times, I have raised in the House the fact that the Saied regime, which is effectively a dictatorship, has locked up the entire opposition. The Ceann Comhairle might be interested to know that I met the son of Rached Ghannouchi, the Speaker of the Assembly in Tunisia. He is in his 80s and has been imprisoned by the Saied regime along with almost all of the opposition. It was a democratic assembly that arose from a popular democratic movement in Tunisia that was part of the Arab Spring. The Saied dictatorship has just locked up democratically elected representatives, yet we are now doing a deal with it. I find that incredible. How can the EU be taken seriously when it denounces authoritarianism but makes a self-interested strategic arrangement with such a regime? Have we called for the release of Rached Ghannouchi and the members of the opposition in the Tunisian Parliament as a condition of a further arrangement with the Tunisian regime?

I met the UN Human Rights Council commission that was dealing with Israel and Palestine. It asked to meet me – I believe it said the same thing to the Government – to say that it was shocked by how different legal standards were being applied to what Putin was doing in Ukraine and what Israel was doing in the Palestinian territories. It believes there is no legal consistency in the international community’s approach to two situations where the same crimes are being committed. There are different attitudes to those crimes because they are being committed by Russia in one instance and an ally of the United States and the West in the other. Please respond to these points. These are important issues and, if we do not address them, our credibility will be zilch.

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