CHARTA ZÁKLADNÍCH PRÁV

The President of the European Parliament, Hans-Gert Pöttering, the Portuguese Prime Minister and President-in-office of the Council, José Sócrates and the Commission President, José Manuel Barroso, have signed and proclaimed today the Charter of Fundamental Rights in a formal ceremony at the European Parliament in Strasbourg.



During the solemn ceremony, the President of the European Parliament Hans-Gert Pöttering underlined in his speech the importance of the Charter for citizens. "Today's formal proclamation of the Charter of Fundamental Rights gives us both an opportunity and an obligation to make clear to the inhabitants of the European Union, to its almost 500 million citizens and the generations of tomorrow, just what European unification signifies. The Treaty of Lisbon which will be signed by the Heads of State and Government tomorrow confers on the Charter the same legally binding character as the Treaties themselves.



In the European Union not everything revolves around economic calculations of costs and benefits. Such calculations are important and will continue to have a bearing on our lives in the EU. First and foremost, however, we are a community of values; we put solidarity, freedom and equal rights into practice every day. These shared values, at whose heart the respect for the inviolable dignity of the individual enshrined in Article 1 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights lies, are the foundations of the European unification process.



Without this clear set of fundamental values, one which we must keep in mind at all times, the European Union has no future. We would also have no right to invoke human rights in other parts of the world if we were to fail in the task of recognising our own values as an integral part of European Union law."

* The text of the speech will be soon available at http://www.europarl.europa.eu/president