African, Caribbean & Pacific issue declaration to EU "To refrain from any attempts to impose its values which are not freely shared"

A group of 79 African, Caribbean and Pacific states recently issued a unilateral declaration “on the peaceful co-existence of religions and the importance given to the phenomenon of homosexuality” in their partnership with the EU.

The Joint Parliamentary Assembly between the EU and African, Caribbean and Pacific states recently signed the revised Cotonou Agreement (PDF), delineating the trade and political relationship between the two parties. Despite the EU’s insistance, ACP states refused to include sexual orientation in the list of grounds on which discrimination should be banned.

Following these negotiations, the ACP group of states adopted a unilateral declaration in September. The declaration calls on the European Union to “refrain from any attempts to impose its values which are not freely shared”, linking homosexuality to incitement to religious hatred.

Download the unilateral declaration (PDF, English and French)

The European Parliament officially received the document late October. In a partial response, it adopted a resolution on the work of the ACP-EU Joint Parliamentary Assembly in 2009. In the resolution drafted by MEP Eva Joly , the European Parliament “reiterates the principle of the universality of human rights and non-discrimination as the basis upon which to enhance legitimate democratic governance and the political dialogue at the Joint Parliamentary Assembly”.

The next ACP-EU Joint Parliamentary Assembly will meet in Kinshasa, DRC, from the 2nd to the 4th December 2010.

So African Caribbean and Pacific states are fighting back it seems given the relaxed nature of the negotiations before during the Cotonou Agreement talks, was this a hint to what was to come on the vote to remove sexual orientation from the list of judicial killings at the recent United Nations meeting where several Caribbean states including Jamaica and Cuba surprisingly voted in favour of it?

There seems to be a collective move behind the political, diplomatic and economic scenes on this vexed issue of orientation conflicted with homosexuality and that foreign states are somehow "imposing" as it were this on so called sovereign nations when these same nations are parties to treatises that include protection of rights for all and respecting the main Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

This bit of news is indeed surprising, this is a section of regional activity on the European and by extension world stage we must watch carefully.

Peace and tolerance

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