Welcome Remarks
Delivered by Hon. Graham Watson, MEP

I’d like to start by thanking Franklin Drilon for hosting this event. It’s wonderful to be here Frank and your hospitality is everything we come to expect of the Philippines. It’ s great to be in a country where the Liberal Party is part of the majority coalition and to enjoy the hospitality of the Liberal Party, of the Council of Asian Liberals and Democrats and the hard work of the Liberal International as well and the Friedrich Naumann Foundation that has going into making this meeting possible. It’s a particular honor for those of us from the European Union to be here in the presence of former President Corazon Aquino. The achievements of her government and her contribution to the development to this country are indeed great. And to enjoy, President, your warm welcome is a great pleasure indeed.

I particularly like coming to the Philippines because I know you’re a country with a sense of humor. Only a country with a sense of humor could have produced the famous Pontiff with the name of Cardinal Sin. The genesis of the idea of these conferences was about 10 years ago in Cebu at a conference bringing together young politicians from the European Union and from Asia. Butch Abad and Neric Acosta and I were sitting around and drinking one of the wonderful fruit juices that they produce in Cebu and we said “we got to get together on a regular basis…liberal parliamentarians from Europe and from Asia”. And it has worked extremely well. We held our first conference in Seoul in 2003. We held another one in Brussels in 2004. We are, this week, in Manila and I hope that next year and the year afterwards we will be able to meet in Strasbourg to continue our cooperation. Here today, I am please to accompany and please to bring to you members of the European Parliament from the United Kingdom, from Hungary, from the Netherlands, from Finland. I know there are members of Parliament from many other European countries in the Liberal International delegation. We recognize that there is so much we can achieve together. We have been particularly pleased to host through a Staff Training Program that we have set-up. Trainees, young staffers from parliament from Singapore, from Malaysia, from Thailand, from Cambodia, from Taiwan in the European Parliament and we hope to be able to find other ways of deepening our cooperation. We all know how necessary it is in today’s world for liberals to come together and work together on the common challenges that we face. Not only the challenge of poverty, the challenge of education, the kind of economic reforms that we need if we are to give hope of a decent life to so many of our fellow citizens on the planet but also the challenges that we face on a daily basis to freedom and democracy. As Frank Drilon said, “Our friend Chee Soon Juan has only recently been released from prison in Singapore”. Our colleagues face similar challenges in Burma, The People’s Republic of China- the biggest county in the world still lives without the freedom that its citizens aspire to. Martin Luther King once said that, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”. Well, I think similarly that threats to democracy anywhere are a challenge to democracy and to democrats everywhere. It is the duty of us all to protect and nurture the democracy that gives us the freedom and the economic success on which to build human health and happiness. It is the duty of us all to protect democracy not just former Presidents, not just those involved in politics today but of every citizen to speak at when things start to go wrong. Certainly, as I look across the world from one particular corner of Western Europe it seems to me that the great advantage if India over China in the coming years is the fact that India is a strong and successful democracy. It’s not always easy to mobilize people when you need it. I have recently been dealing with the difficulty of my own constituency and I can tell you what happened. One of my constituents, I have an elderly couple living in not far from where I live. They looked to their window one day and they saw some burglars breaking in on their garden shed, obviously trying to steal what was in it. So, of course being an elderly they called the police and they explained to the policeman and the policeman said, ”Well, I’m sorry we can’t send you anybody now, we have nobody available”. In a couple of hours time we’ll send someone over”. My constituents were not very impressed so they thought about it. They had an idea and they run back to the police station and they said,” Don’t worry, don’t call and send anybody” said, ”We’ll take-in a gun and shoot them”. Well, you can imagine, within three minutes there was not one but three police cars outside, there was a police helicopter circling over head. There was a police marksman on their wall and when the policeman rang the doorbell they weren’t very pleased to discover that indeed these people haven’t been shot. The police were very fast they called them. And they said to my constituents, ”I thought you said you shot them?” to which my constituents said to the police officer, ”I thought you said you had nobody available?”.

We need to mobilize people from time to time to protect democracy whether it’s here in the Philippines, in Taiwan, or in Western Europe or anywhere else. We face great challenges, the challenge of dealing with a rapidly growing world population and pressure from migration stemming from conflict or hunger or sometimes pure despair. The challenge of dealing with climate change, the build-up of CO₂ and the melting of the icecaps, and the challenge of dealing with the internationally organized crime, where we now have some criminal gangs which are sometimes more powerful than the national government, increasingly links to terrorism. These are all challenges to which liberalism is particularly well suited. If your ideology is rooted in nationalism or in theocracy, you will not be able to work together with people from other cultures or other countries very successfully. If your ideology is rooted in an outdated blueprint of society divided along the lines of social class you will not find the answers to the challenges of the world today.  But if your ideology is rooted in the intelligence and the dignity of the individual and in the power of the human spirit, then you will certainly come-up with the right answers. And that is why the 21^st century, in my mind, will be the liberal century and why this meeting today is so important for us in developing the answers to the common challenges that we face.