Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/1999-09-13-Speech-1-076"
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"en.19990913.7.1-076"2
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"Mr President, I rise as the rapporteur on the draft recommendation from the European Commission on the provision of minimum criteria for environmental inspections. The most important thing about my report is that I rejected the idea – and the Committee has backed me on this – that it should be a recommendation. I want to make sure that this instrument is in fact a directive. I am absolutely certain that the speech which Mr Marin is now anxiously looking through rejects what I am about to say.
It is a very important point and underlies some of the disappointments that people feel about the European Union in many of our countries. It is based on the perception that we adopt legislation in the European Union which is then not implemented universally throughout the Member States of the European Union. I do not know about my MEP colleagues but certainly this was one of the criticisms made against the European Union during the British version of the European election campaign.
It is a situation at the moment where there are currently more than eighty actions pending before the Court of Justice against eleven Member States for infringement of European Union environmental legislation. I know, as rapporteur on the recent directive on landfill, that what is happening is that the European Commission is proposing legislation on the basis that it will be adopted and properly implemented in all the Member States while at the same time the same directorate-general of the European Union knows full well that in some areas of policy no inspectorates at all exist able to see that that legislation is implemented in some Member States of the European Union.
The European Commission’s recipe for dealing with this is for inspectors from the various Member States to meet together from time to time to try to improve their techniques and to make that into a recommendation. There is nothing particularly radical about it at all. I and the members of the Environment Committee feel that this is grossly inadequate and that if it is not a directive there will in fact be no impulsion on the Member States which are currently lagging behind to do anything at all.
The advantage of transforming the recommendation into a directive is twofold. First of all it creates the momentum for changes to take place under the eventual sanction of financial penalties and secondly, by taking the proposed text of the recommendation, which we have before us as its base, avoids creating a directive which is too heavily prescriptive in detail. People want to see the legislation implemented. They do not want what they call ‘red tape’. This instrument, if transformed into a directive, would mean that we are able to see through the European Commission and through the Members of Parliament whether anybody is actually doing anything. The likelihood is that if we leave it as a recommendation somebody in five years time or so may or may not remember to report to the European Parliament that a recommendation was passed and that very little was done about it. A directive has legal force and we feel that is what is needed.
I note that the Greens have proposed an amendment drawing attention to the opinion of the European Parliament that there should be some form of European Union environmental inspectorate. We have to tread very carefully here if we are not to tie up even more red tape around the Member States. It is much better, rather than going for a supranational environment inspectorate with all the difficulty about right of entry, if we have the legislation in place to make sure that the environmental inspectorates in all the Member States (a) exist and (b) are performing their tasks to more or less the same standard. You can only do that through a directorate. A recommendation is grossly inadequate."@en1
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"Jackson (PPE ),"1
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