Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-07-07-Speech-5-044"
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"en.20000707.3.5-044"2
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"Mr President, yesterday we debated and voted on a report from the Committee on Petitions. This year that Committee has dealt with a thousand complaints from citizens. Forty percent of those one thousand complaints are associated with violations of Community environmental law. Given these complaints we can appreciate the need for the proposal that we are examining, a Council proposal at the request of the Kingdom of Denmark, and also the need to approve the reports by Mr Di Lello Finuoli and by Mrs Schörling, from the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Consumer Policy.
I believe that this report covers three important aspects. Firstly, the request that the Council of Europe Convention on the Environment should not only be signed, but also that it should be ratified. No state has ratified the convention so far, but that is not contradictory with adopting this report here today. The report gives a quite correct definition of the parameters that are useful for defining the crime: repeated violations of Community law, the seriousness of the damage and, in some cases, putting profits before any other consideration. We believe that the crimes are often clearly premeditated. Of course they are, Mr President, even in the case of some environmental crimes that appear to be accidental. I well remember the case of Doñana in Spain or of the Danube. It was obvious that a reservoir containing such a large quantity of dangerous products near to a natural park such as Doñana could cause an accident at any time.
Secondly, Mr President, I feel that penalties are essential. I am in no doubt about this. Some of the Members here today shed doubt on the need for penalties. I do not. I think that even the ‘polluter pays’ principle is a partial one. Sometimes there are those who prefer to pollute and pay a small amount, which is much less than the profits that they will gain from committing the crime. Penalties are therefore essential, and they need to be designed to act as a deterrent and to be proportional to the damage to citizens’ quality of life.
Thirdly, the natural environment should be regenerated. Mr President, is it not acceptable that, in the case of Doñana, public money should be being used to regenerate the area, while the company that caused the major damage has only contributed a small proportion? It is therefore essential to regenerate the damaged environment, and also for legal persons to be liable. Only in the United Kingdom, Finland, and Denmark are there rules that enable legal persons to be held liable.
To conclude, Mr President, I would like to mention cooperation between states, which is essential. In the Committee on Petitions, we are aware of the terrible frustration felt by those citizens who take the trouble to report environmental crimes and see that, in Europe, we are incapable of coming to their aid in order to improve the natural environment in which they live and to prevent these crimes."@en1
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