Some 60 human rights organisations are sounding the alarm because they are concerned about the suspension of work in the European Parliament during the Qatargate corruption investigation, they wrote in a joint open letter earlier this week.
The human rights NGOs expressed their "greatest concerns over recent debates and proposals to freeze all activities of the European Parliament’s Human Rights Subcommittee (DROI) and to stop all urgency resolutions."
The Network for Human Rights and Democracy – which includes the International Federation for Human Rights, Amnesty International, the International Centre for Transitional Justice, Reporters Without Borders and Oxfam, among others – is concerned that the "baby is being thrown out with the bathwater."
"Halting all human rights activities of the European Parliament while sweepingly calling into question the integrity and contribution of all civil society organisations in EU policy-making would be solely in the interest of perpetrators of human rights abuses, to the detriment of their victim," the signatories wrote.
The human rights organisations emphasised that the work of this subcommittee "has contributed to the release of human rights defenders and political prisoners, to halting the adoption or triggering the reform of abusive legislation, and ultimately to human rights progress and accountability efforts around the world."
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After a search of the office of one of her staff members, the Chair of the human rights committee Marie Arena (a Belgian MEP) stepped back temporarily. In November, the committee heard the Qatari Minister of Labour, where MEPs Marc Tarabella and Andrea Cozzolino were both named in the affair.
Now, both men have been suspended by their parties while the investigation is carried out. Meanwhile, former MEP Pier Antonio Panzeri, a key figure in the case, also chaired this sub-committee during the previous legislature, which heard the Fight Impunity organisation on several occasions.
