madam president i want to place on record my support for what other colleagues have said on the issue of parliamentary scrutiny of the instruments and of the instrument for democracy and human rights in particular
i want to thank the commission for the structured cooperation we have
by nature human rights defenders are at risk and there needs to be a degree of privacy
let us make sure that this cooperation continues in the future
one criticism of the projects would be that we run very high quality projects but they are pepper-potted around the world and have not been sufficiently integrated into the other programmes
the setting up of the external action service gives us a chance to remedy this
we should make sure that we do so
the concern that some of the programmes that are currently prepared by legally-qualified people may not be in the future is something that we need to deal with in order to maintain that quality in the future as well
finally with what is happening in egypt and elsewhere in the arab world at the moment we know there will be an increasing call for finance for democracy-building and election monitoring in the future
we have insisted on the fixed percentage within the regulation otherwise it would crowd out other human rights projects
however we may need more money and when it comes to the new financial perspective we must not go back to the old argument that we should get rid of this regulation
it is needed today more than ever
