10/11/2008 President
PACE President Lluis Maria de Puig has warned of the “danger” that tolerence in society is most severely tested when times are hard economically.
Addressing an event at the European Parliament in Brussels to mark the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the night in 1938 when Jewish-owned buildings were smashed and burned across Nazi Germany, Mr de Puig pointed out that the Depression of the 1930s had been a contributory factor.
Europe still faces challenges of intolerance, he said, from discrimination against Roma or immigrants, to ethnic cleansing in the 1990s, to the desecration of graves by neo-Nazi groups. “Old demons have often been replaced by new.”
The President pointed out that the European Convention on Human Rights was a modern-day legal bulwark against the atrocities of Kristallnacht and what followed it, but that fighting intolerance was also a matter of shaping mind-sets through education and culture. The main message of tolerance could be summed up in the Council of Europe slogan: “All different, all equal”.