Open letter to Jerzy Buzek

2011-06-17

Dear Mr. President, I would like to bring to your attention an unfortunate incident that happened in the meeting of the Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs Committee (LIBE) on Wednesday, June 15.

 

At the above mentioned meeting, at the point of the agenda of the Hungarian Presidency presentation, during my intervention (in Hungarian) as well as after it, my socialist colleague, Mr. Ioan Enciu, MEP shouted to me loudly, in Romanian: "Talk in Romanian, hey!"  (as Mr. Enciu did not use his microphone, his sentence was not recorded nor translated).

The incident did not end by any means, as Mr. Enciu stood up, came over to me and continued to 'instruct' me, despite the fact that he was obviously disturbing the meeting of the Committee. I kindly ask you to act as the President of the European Parliament according to the Rules of Procedure, articles 20 and 152. I do this request hoping that thanks to your intervention, similar situations will not ever happen again to me or any of my colleagues.

Details on the webstream of the LIBE meeting:

http://www.europarl.europa.eu/wps-europarl-internet/frd/vod/player?category=COMMITTEE&eventCode=20110615-1500-COMMITTEE-LIBE&format=wmv&byLeftMenu=researchcommittee&language=en#anchor1

At 15:43 on basis of the off microphone recording of the meeting, it is hard to understand what happened, although the Chairman of the LIBE committee, Mr. Juan Fernando Lopez Aguilar at this point gave me the right to react (16:09 on the recording).

Dear Mr. President,

I appreciate greatly the immediate reaction of the Chairman and I am grateful to him, nonetheless I still ask for your intervention.

My mother tongue, the Hungarian language, is one of the official languages of the European Union. Is not the first time that the right to use it is not respected in this House. For me personally, this was not the first time that I had to face negative, abusive and embarrassing situations regarding my choice of language, despite the fact that the European Parliament ensures the broadest language rights among the EU institutions.

Yours sincerely,

Csaba SÓGOR

Member of the European Parliament