MUDr. Milan Cabrnoch, MEP, European Parliament, Strasbourg, 9th June, 2005: Honorable chairman, ladies and gentlemen, I thank you for the opportunity to express my views on the proposed report on social integration in the new member states of the European Union. Firstly, I would like to thank the reporter for his work and congratulate him for not interchanging social integration with equalitarianism or corporativism.

When creating special conditions for distinct groups of citizens, we must never forget the equality of all citizens. Positive discrimination is as condemnable as negative discrimination.

It is a fact that there exist groups of citizens, who are more or less distinct from others. I fully support the sympathy with these groups of citizens. I am convinced that the best way to achieve their social integration is a creation of equal conditions. Administrative separation of individual groups does not achieve social integration, but merely leads to further social isolation. When we take into account the list of all the disadvantaged groups mentioned in the report, namely:

Women
Incomplete families
People entering the job market
Elderly
Poor
Patients
Handicapped
People taking care of elderly and patients
Underprivileged children
Children endangered by the absense of the parental influence
Language minorities
Refugees
Imigrants
Gypsies
Other ethnical minorities
Homeless
People addicted to drugs and alcohol,

we may come to the conclusion that normal undisadvantaged citizens form an endagered minority in the society. I believe that we do not need to create special programs for the support of the citizens who have not managed to join any of these disadvantaged groups.

In the discussed report, we fight against exclusion. It is paradoxical that it is in this report that we have excluded ten out of the twenty five member states with equal rights, merely because they joined the European Union a couple of years later than other member states. I strongly believe that the European Union will do away even with this form of exclusion soon.

The proposed report refers to the proposed Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe. I realize that this text is from the time when it was not yet clear that the text of the Constitution is dead. After the citizens of France and The Netherlands rejected the proposed Constitution for Europe, these references lack any substance and should be expunged completely from the report.

Report on social inclusion in the new Member States [PDF, 97kB]