Next Tuesday, 10 December, the European Parliament will be able to vote once again on the Estrela Draft Resolution without any debate. In order to expedite the process, the members of the Parliament were denied the right to submit amendments to the text during its review by the Commission. This text has already been rejected once on 22 October and sent back to the Commission for further consideration.
As it stands, this radical text remains absolutely unacceptable, as it violates several key principles:
– The right to life of all human beings, because it recommends that the European Union finance abortion throughout the world as well as destructive embryonic research in Europe;
– The freedom of conscience of health workers, because it wants to diminish the fundamental right of conscious objection;
– The education rights of parents and children, in imposing the mandatory education of gender ideology to all children;
– National sovereignty, because abortion does not fall within the scope of European jurisdiction (see here);
– And European law, which on the one hand acknowledges that the human embryo needs protection under the provision for the respect for human dignity (Judgement of Brustle v Greenpeace) and on the other hand clearly states that a “Human Right” to abortion does not exist (see here, here and here).
Furthermore, this Draft Resolution aims to stop the European Citizens’ Initiative “One of Us,” which was signed by nearly two million Europeans. The procedure of the European Citizens’ Initiative was established to democratize the European institutions by allowing people to participate in the legislative process. The “One of Us” Initiative, which has obtained the greatest success in Europe to date, asks for the cessation of the European public funding on abortion and destruction of human embryos. The promoters of the Estrela Resolution, in attempting to stop the European Citizens’ initiative, are demonstrating the contempt for participative democracy and for the European citizens who participate in it. If the Estrela Resolution is adopted, it would discredit both the European Parliament and the European Citizens’ Initiative procedure.
Grégor Puppinck, as President of the European Initiative Committee “One of Us”, therefore calls for the President and the members of the European Parliament to reject this Draft Resolution, due to these substantial and procedural justifications. He asks them to respect the European Citizen’s Initiative procedure that they themselves have adopted, by delaying the parliamentary debate on the public financing of abortion and the destructive research on embryos until the next review of the Initiative “One of Us”.
Whatever the outcome of this vote, the legislative proposal of the Citizen’s Initiative “One of Us” will be submitted to the European Commission and the European Parliament after the next European Elections. Contrary to the Estrela Resolution, which has a political significance but not a directly legal one, the legislative proposal “One of Us” will have binding legal effect.
Grégor Puppinck invites the signatories of the Initiative “One of Us” to contact their representatives in the European Parliament by telephone and email (details here) to ask them to reject the Estrela draft Resolution, and possibly, to adopt one or the other of the two resolutions proposed by the EFD and the EPP.
And today we celebrate...