Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/1999-11-18-Speech-4-076"

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"The rapporteur in his introduction said that the objective is to implement the Dublin Convention and have a system of fingerprinting. My group agrees in principle with that, but we want some safeguards. Mr Pirker also said that the purpose was to ensure that there are no social abuses of the system. Again, my group would agree with that, but we want to make certain of this, which is why safeguards are necessary to ensure that there are no abuses by the authorities either. I believe that there are some on the right of this House who wish to muddy the waters and to draw no distinction between asylum seekers and illegal immigrants, third country nationals. I shy away from the use of the word 'foreigners', or indeed the word that was used in the translation of the English text. In English 'aliens' are people from another planet and to be perfectly honest we do not have much of a problem with that at the moment. There seem to be, though, Members of this House who have no sympathy with either group – and if there were aliens from another planet, they would probably have little sympathy with them either. The safeguards and the amendments that we are asking for are designed to ensure that any data collected is processed properly and that where people are granted asylum or achieve legitimate status the data collected is deleted. On the age limit, it is sometimes very difficult to tell the age of a young person, but there seems to be a consensus that 18 is a fair compromise. Mrs McKenna in her impassioned speech a few moments ago said that we must ensure that asylum seekers and others are not treated as criminals. Certainly we want to ensure that this new system is used to assist the most vulnerable in our society. I accept, as I am sure we all must do, that people do not leave their homes and families and travel half-way across Europe thousands of miles away for no reason at all. They do not do just it on a whim, they do it for a real reason and we must accept and respect the fact that they need support and they need help and assistance. I hope – and I am sure the Commissioner is listening – we can make certain that when this system comes into full operation, it is used positively, humanely and with considerable compassion to help and support the most vulnerable in our society."@en1
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