Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/1999-10-27-Speech-3-124"
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"en.19991027.3.3-124"2
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"Madame President, the Tampere Council which has just taken place, dedicated to the so-called European area “of freedom, security and justice”, did make a few good technical decisions to strengthen cooperation in the fight against crime and in favour of judicial coordination, for example by means of the wider use of mutual recognition of legal judgements in civil and criminal law, as you yourself, Madam President, indeed recommended in your introductory speech.
More generally however, particularly when it dealt with the subject of immigration, the Council became bogged down in two contradictions which indeed both suggest either its lack of political courage or the mutual paralysis of its members, it is not very clear which.
The first contradiction: whereas, in the Treaty of Amsterdam, the means were proudly established to make immigration matters totally Community-controlled, the Tampere Council suddenly becomes more cautious. It is as if the heads of state and government, who are always willing, in treaties, to sign up to great European principles that do not commit you to anything, were suddenly appalled at the practical consequences of this new text. The difference in tone is so marked that it is hard to believe that these same people signed both the Treaty of Amsterdam and the Tampere conclusions with an interval of six months. The contradiction becomes frankly laughable in the case of the French Government which, in the Amsterdam Treaty, signed in favour of the financial and physical distribution of refugees among the states of the Union, and which now recoils at the consequences of its own signature.
The second contradiction: the Tampere Council propounds its purely formal intention to control the flows of migrants and to combat illegal immigration at source, but, at the same time, staunchly proclaims, on several occasions, that legal immigrants must be given, I quote, “a set of uniform rights which are as near as possible to those enjoyed by EU citizens”, and that as a priority a policy of integration must be set up to enable them to stay.
This is absurd. Obviously, the more rights you give legal immigrants, the more immigrants you are going to attract, including illegal immigrants hoping that their situation will one day be regularised. How much more time will it take for the Council and the Commission to see, in this matter too, the catastrophic practical consequences of the principles they publicly maintain?"@en1
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