Edward H. C. McMillan-Scott (born August 15, 1949, Cambridge) is a British politician, Member of the European Parliament for the Yorkshire and the Humber region for the Conservative Party. He was the MEP for York from 1984 to 1994, MEP for North Yorkshire from 1994 to 1999, and MEP for Yorkshire and the Humber from 1999 - 2004 and 2004 to the present.
He is founder of the European Democracy Initiative, with a budget of some €140 million which was originally aimed at the transformation of the ex-Soviet bloc and which he is now directing towards the reforming Arab world and 'difficult' countries such as China, Cuba and Russia.
McMillan-Scott was leader of the Conservative MEPs between 1997 and 2001.
On 23 July 2004 he was elected fourth of the 14 Vice-Presidents of the European Parliament. He was re-elected a Vice-President in 2007.
McMillan-Scott's responsibilities as Vice-President include relations with national EU parliaments and the EuroMed parliamentary assembly, which brings together 240 MPs from the EU, North Africa and the Middle East.
He was elected chairman of the European Parliament's largest-ever election observer missions, 30 MEPs, to Palestine in January 2005 and January 2006 for the presidential and parliamentary elections respectively.
He wrote a ground-breaking report for the European Parliament's foreign affairs committee on a new EU/China strategy in 1997. After a visit to Beijing in May 2006, all the Chinese with whom he had contact - reformists, ex-prisoners of conscience, dissidents - were arrested, imprisoned and in some cases tortured. His campaign aimed at a political boycott of the August 2008 Beijing Olympic Games was his response (see www.BoycottBeijing.eu). In the event, the Presidents of the European Parliament and European Commission boycotted, as did the EU's external affairs Commissioner, apart from the Canadian and New Zealand premiers, Prince Charles and famously, Steven Spielberg.
He campaigns for improved children's rights across the EU and has successfully dealt with a number of cross-frontier child abduction cases. He is currently campaigning for an EU-wide missing child alert with Kate and Gerry McCann, parents of missing Madeleine. A majority of MEPs supported a resolution to this effect, sponsored in the summer of 2008 by McMillan-Scott.. In the USA, the Department of Justice's Amber Alert has recovered 400 abducted children since 2003, 80% within the crucial first 72 hours. France has an identical system but other countries, including the UK, rely on a patchwork of volunteers and charities.
His 'Golden Fleece' campaign against fraud and malpractice in the Costa villa and timeshare market won wide support and both national and EU consumer laws. He is currently campaigning for more secure property rights in the EU's neighbourhood, as buyers move into the Balkans, Turkey and North Africa, where the legal framework is insecure.
He speaks French, Italian, some German and Spanish. He is married to Henrietta, a member of the Law Society's Children's Panel: they have two daughters.
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