European Liberal Youth call on EU to keep China arms ban
Brussels, 07/09/06:European Liberal Youth –LYMEC- calls upon the European Union to keep ban on arms sales to China in view of next weekend’s EU-Asia summit taking place in Helsinki, Finland.
The arms ban was put in place by the EU following the violent crackdown by China’s communist regime against pro-democracy protestors on Beijing’s Tiananmen square in 1989, which left more than 2000 civilians dead.
A year ago a number of socialist and conservatives leaders such as French president Jacques Chirac, Spanish Prime Minister José Luís Rodríguez Zapatero or former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder advocated ending the embargo. Nevertheless, the European Parliament with a strong leadership from the liberal group (ALDE) always recommended not to lift the embargo as other European governments had proposed like those led by liberal forces such as Denmark.
LYMEC president Roger Albinyana commented “the reasons for imposing this embargo was China’s human rights violations. If they want the embargo to be removed, then we expect some meaningful progress on the human rights’ field”, and he continued “we as Europeans do not want our governments to sell arms to a dictatorship”. And he concluded “we as liberals hope that the Finnish Presidency will stick to its principles and stop any attempt from other European governments to remove this embargo”.
LYMEC believes that the European Union should strongly stick to the political principles that enhanced the establishment of this embargo, even though China is today the EU’s second largest trade partner.
