Allocution of Yves Leterme Prime Minister of Belgium at the opening ceremony of Esplanade Solidarnosc and Agora

At the end of the nineteen seventies, Europe was given a lesson in civil courage and democratic beliefs from Poland. Under the inspired leadership of an electrician, Lech Walensa, workers from the Polish shipyards formed the union Solidarnosc, to fight for civic freedoms and labour rights. We did not realise it at the time, but, as history has shown, those so called ordinary people gave a decisive impulse to the Europe whole and free that most of our continent is today.

Much earlier still, in the forties, Simone Veil was confronted with the absolute evil of the shoah. It took incredible courage and determination for a very young girl to survive deportation and extermination camps. During her whole political engagement in France and Europe, Simone Veil demonstrated the same courage, and unshakable conviction, to defend and realise our core values: the belief in the dignity of each human being;  the belief in equality, of men and women, of people of all origins and races;  the belief in an ever closer European Union as a safeguard against war, violence and all forms of exclusion.

The names we bestow today on these public spaces will remind us that, first, freedom and democracy are never given, that it takes conviction, courage and discipline to realise and to safeguard them. And secondly, that the European Union is, first and foremost, not a market but a community of values, of those values embodied by Solidarnosc and Simone Veil, to whom I want to express my most sincere feelings of admiration and gratitude.