Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/1999-10-27-Speech-3-011"
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"en.19991027.1.3-011"2
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"Madam President, this summit was highly significant and its outcome better, less repressive, than expected. We will look back in amazement at how much more progress Europe made on cutting red tape on goods and businesses than it did on people. This must now change quickly. But Parliament is not yet a full partner and that must be our goal over the next few years.
It is unacceptable that Europe’s directly elected representatives are, despite the presidency conclusions’ stress on democracy, marginalised in the creation of the area of freedom, security and justice. May I say how much I believe the voice of Parliament is strengthened by the ability of four groups to agree on the resolution put forward today.
I can only pick out a few points, but firstly: refugees. We welcome the reaffirmation of the full and inclusive application of the Geneva Convention, and credit is due to the Finnish presidency for this point. It is very important that the common EU asylum system – which ought, however, to be a single system and incorporate EU funding – should not be based on the lowest common denominator. We must also be very careful not to whip up racist prejudice and we look forward to proposals based on Article 13 to combat racism.
On individual rights, some progress was made but not enough. We very much welcome the reiteration of how important it is to legislate to give legally-resident third country nationals rights as near as possible to those of EU citizens. This is now urgent.
We also need tangible progress on the rights of EU citizens to move freely and reside elsewhere. It was a pity nothing was said at Tampere about rights to access information and documents despite transparency being cited as one of the important principles.
In the area of access to justice we need mutual recognition to be accompanied by common minimum standards and it would have been good to see something about the rights of people to get bail when they are criminal defendants in a state other than their own.
We look forward to the body preparing the Charter of Fundamental Rights, which it would be appropriate for a representative of this Parliament to chair, producing a document which can confer direct rights on EU citizens and enable them as individuals to enforce their rights in the European Court. It is appropriate to give governmental authorities greater cross-border powers to pursue criminals but the use of these powers must be supervised by the European Parliament and the European courts so that civil liberties are entrenched and robustly defended."@en1
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