Liam Aylward (UEN). – Mr President, one of the issues that will be addressed at the forthcoming ACP-EU Council meeting in Germany next week will be a re-evaluation EU policy on Sudan. There is an ever-deteriorating security situation in Darfur, and let no one think otherwise. Without a safe and secure environment, we cannot access the people most in need. A full-scale humanitarian crisis is being faced by over four million people who are living in Darfur at this time. More than half a million people were displaced from Sudan in 2006 alone.

The international community has simply not been tough enough when dealing with the Sudanese Government over Darfur. The Sudanese Government has played a game of cat-and-mouse with the international community so that the European Union and the United Nations would have as weak a role as possible in Sudan.

I welcome recent moves to increase the presence of African Union forces in Sudan under what is known as the African Union Mission there, but the difficulty for these troops is that they are not well trained and there are not enough of them. Moreover, the European Union must look to tighten the sanctions regime against the Sudanese Government to incorporate a ban on travel into the European Union by key Sudanese Government members and officials and to block Sudanese Government representatives from making financial investments in Europe.