Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-03-16-Speech-4-048"
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"en.20000316.2.4-048"2
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"Mr President, I want first to thank Mrs Read and Parliament for the report, which has been produced extremely rapidly and is very important, because the extraordinary summit will take place next week and the e-Europe initiative is one of the fundamental documents there.
Your report expresses concern about the smart card action. I would like to assure you that this action is not intended to intervene in an area that, the report rightly notes, is market-driven. The Commission's role is purely a facilitating one, bringing together the key actors and enabling them to move towards agreement on standard approaches. The aim is not to disadvantage other technologies. It is not clear how the Commission can guarantee ethical security of services, but I fully share the view that we should take all measures to ensure respect for human rights; existing actions, primarily the Internet action plan, address this issue.
Finally, I would like to close by thanking you once again for your work in this area. The efforts which you have made confirm that you share with us a sense of the importance and urgency of this issue for Europe.
The subtitle of the e-Europe initiative, “An Information Society for All”, or we could also say as Mr Seppänen has said here, “A Knowledge-based Society for All”, is an indication of the far-reaching objectives of this initiative. We welcome the contribution of Parliament to this very important policy debate.
The Commission is currently contributing to the preparation of next week's summit in Lisbon. To this end, the Commission has adopted several communications including a progress report on e-Europe last week and a paper setting out an agenda for economic and social renewal for Europe two weeks ago. I find it very important that Parliament is participating through today's debate in the discussions before the Lisbon Summit. The debate has been really illuminating and has shown the great interest and also the expertise of Parliament on this issue. We hope that the Lisbon European Council will endorse concrete, focused policy actions providing a strong signal that European leaders are determined to transform Europe into a dynamic and competitive economy.
As to the content of your reports, I note that you have expressed concern that mechanisms through which the targets of e-Europe are to be achieved are not made explicit in our initial document. In this context, the progress report submitted by the Commission to the Lisbon Council last week and also submitted to you last week will provide further details. In addition, there will be an e-Europe action plan by June as requested at the Helsinki Summit. I hope that these documents will answer many of your concerns in relation to the realisation of the goals of e-Europe, but it may be that some of the issues will not be addressed, because we must try to remain focused in this initiative.
I am particularly pleased to see that the report shares the Commission's view on the key elements of e-Europe. It is essential to create a modern multimedia high-performance e-infrastructure, to create legal certainty in e-commerce, to counteract the skills shortage and to improve the availability of risk capital to stimulate innovation. Your support to move forward on these key elements of e-Europe is most welcome.
I find the idea of organising an e-government conference highly interesting. It is important that we in the European institutions, along with Member States, develop effective means of exploiting the potential of regional technologies, to increase both the efficiency and transparency of our interactions with citizens.
I can report to you that this will be one of the main topics of a ministerial conference organised by the Portuguese presidency in Lisbon in early April. I would also like to add that the White Paper on the Commission's internal reform contains an “e-Commission” action. The aim is to enhance the Commission's IT and communications infrastructure in order to provide better service by means of the Internet.
I would like to briefly respond to some items where the emphasis of the discussion has perhaps been a little different from the Commission document. The Commission is asked to include an eleventh action line on employment and social cohesion. I fully accept that these are very high priorities, and for that very reason particular communications have been accepted on these subjects. I would like to mention especially the communication “Strategies for Jobs in the Information Society”. I also agree with you that the information society is perhaps the biggest opportunity for structural policies and policies for cohesion that we have had, because it means the death of distance.
The “e-Europe” communication focuses on the actions necessary to accelerate the transition to the information society. These actions will result in increasing numbers of jobs and will thereby reduce the principal cause of social exclusion, namely unemployment."@en1
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