Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-03-15-Speech-3-174"
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"en.20000315.5.3-174"2
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".
Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I shall reply very directly to the questions that have been raised, so as to avoid any possible doubt about the Council’s position, and I think it is indeed important for that position to be clarified.
With regard to the scope of the Eurodac system, I would like to recall that Article 1 of the proposal for a regulation on establishing this system is very clear, so let me quote it: “A system known as ‘Eurodac’ is hereby established, the purpose of which shall be to assist in determining which Member State is to be responsible pursuant to the Dublin Convention,” I repeat, “pursuant to the Dublin Convention, for examining an application for asylum lodged in a Member State, and otherwise to facilitate the application of the Dublin Convention under the conditions set out in this Regulation”. This is the sole objective of the regulation, which is an instrument pursuant to the Dublin Convention and which goes no further than that objective.
As regards the role of the European Commission, Article 3 of the proposal for a regulation clearly defines that a Central Unit shall be set up within the Commission. Furthermore, the Commission has, as we know, started to work on this, and preparations for establishing a Central Unit are under way.
Concerning the role of the European Parliament, I would like to clarify something that can only be the result of a misunderstanding. I would like to make it very clear that in no way has the Council stated its opposition to all Parliament’s amendments, nor has it called upon the European Commission to come up with any new proposals. Some of Parliament’s amendments were in fact incorporated into the proposal for a regulation, which is a point I wish to stress. In addition, I would like to remind you that all the Justice and Home Affairs Council’s proposals on this matter have been presented to this House, which has, in fact, given its opinion on this matter on three occasions: 15 January 1998, 18 March 1999 and 11 November 1999.
At present, as you know, and for reasons that are not entirely relevant to this issue, but have more to do with other circumstances of a political nature, it has not been possible to reach a consensus within the Council on the new proposal to be submitted to this House. We hope that this will happen shortly, perhaps even during the Portuguese Presidency.
With regard to the other questions raised here, the first was the minimum age for taking fingerprints, which has been set at 14 years. I recognise that there are some concerns about this, but I would like to say that this is in line with the practices followed in Member States, which in some cases even allow fingerprints to be taken from children under 14. I would like to highlight an important aspect which was probably not taken into consideration when discussing this age limit: an ever increasing number of applications for asylum are submitted by minors, and such situations need to be monitored using technical procedures of this kind.
As regards the involvement of the European Parliament and of the courts, I think that Title IV of the Treaty of Amsterdam is sufficiently clear about the role of this Parliament and the Court of Justice in this field.
I believe that the need to safeguard privacy is properly covered by the provisions of Article 18 of the proposal for a regulation, to which I would like to draw your attention, and which, in addition, refers to the rights already enshrined in Directive 95/46. Furthermore, as a result of Article 1 of the proposal for a regulation, and I think it is very important that this should be reiterated here, it is clear that the application of Eurodac will, at all times, be governed by the principles enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights and in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. I believe that these points mean we can say that this is a safe system without any aspects that could jeopardise citizens’ rights. But we have to recognise that the creation of a set of EU mechanisms for regulating all these issues relating to applications for asylum needs to be subject to rigorous technical scrutiny, failing which it could be perceived as implying a loss of citizens’ rights."@en1
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