Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-07-07-Speech-5-047"
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"en.20000707.3.5-047"2
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".
Mr President, honourable Members, I think I can say with regard to your last request that I would be happy to accept it along these lines. The Commission takes the view that the initiative of the Kingdom of Denmark for a Council Framework Decision basically consists of two parts. The first part should lead to any serious culpable breach of environmental legislation within the Community being punishable with criminal sanctions which are effective and act as a deterrent. It puts forward a minimum standard with regard to criminal acts. The initiative mainly focuses on this part, which in essence corresponds to the provisions of a convention which was adopted by the Council of Europe in November 1998. Unfortunately, none of the Member States – and this has also been pointed out several times here – has ratified this convention yet. I can therefore understand Denmark’s initiative, which now seeks to deal with this issue afresh within the framework of the Community powers.
In the interest of the initiative’s chances of implementation, it may well be advisable to proceed in this case by talking about responsibility of legal persons without using the words “under criminal law”. Irrespective of this, however, the persons responsible for serious environmental offences should, of course, also be subject to criminal law. There was in fact unanimous agreement on this in this very interesting debate.
To conclude, may I say, on behalf of the Commission, that, unfortunately, we are repeatedly having to instigate infringement proceedings against Member States in matters of environmental law, and there is a large number of infringement proceedings pending in this self-same sector. Unfortunately, this gives the overall impression that perhaps many Member States do not take the area of environmental protection and environmental law so seriously after all. Against this background, the Danish initiative is very noteworthy and significant from the Commission’s point of view.
The second part, on the other hand, contains provisions on improving cooperation and the exchange of information between the law enforcement authorities and the courts of law of the Member States. There is a lot to be said for an allembracing approach to such issues of legal assistance and improved cooperation within the judicial field that is not limited just to environmental law. In accordance with this, a Council working group – one speaker has gone into it already – is currently working just on the first part of the initiative, that is, on substantive criminal law.
There are already several initiatives and proposals on improving cooperation in criminal law matters, which are not limited to environmental criminal law. A primary aim of the Treaty of Amsterdam and one of the Communities’ general objectives is to improve mutual legal assistance, the exchange of information and other forms of cooperation between the courts and the public prosecution authorities of the Member States, in order to create a genuine area of freedom, security and justice.
What we need for this are very clear and transparent provisions, which are easy to deal with, and to which the individual authorities can quickly refer when applying the law. The Commission takes the view that in order to achieve this and counteract fragmentation within the field of justice, the rules on legal assistance should have as much general applicability as possible. Special provisions, such as in environmental law, should only be made when required and as an exception. With this in mind, the European Judicial Network was established in 1998 through a joint action. It has started its work and is developing many activities to make legal assistance and the exchange of information easier. Of course, the Commission takes the view that this must be developed further.
As well as the international convention already in existence on legal assistance and mutual recognition of judgements, further Community actions are planned in this area.
The Commission very much welcomes the first part of Denmark’s initiative. Until now, the environment has certainly not been protected as legal property by criminal law in all Member States. While some Member States have specified particular environmental offences in their criminal law, this is not the case with others. A serious breach of environmental law is therefore not necessarily punishable in every Member State. This is then naturally to some extent an incentive for crossborder environmental crimes.
The overall lack of enforcement in environmental protection cannot, of course, be corrected by criminal law measures alone, but here too, this framework decision would certainly provide new impetus. In the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Consumer Policy and the Committee on Citizens’ Freedoms and Rights, Justice and Home Affairs, the question has already been raised as to whether the existing Community law of the first pillar already contains adequate obligations for the Member States. On this subject, it must be said that the instruments of the first pillar frequently provide for sanctions, but these do not necessarily need to be in the form of criminal law. Under the first pillar, it is in principle up to the Member States whether they regard sanctions of administrative law as adequate or whether they take up the sharper sword of criminal law.
I would like to mention one point, which still appears problematic from the Commission’s point of view, and which has also been mentioned in different speeches here, and that is the question of the punishability of legal persons. The Danish initiative provides that legal persons must be made responsible under criminal law for serious environmental offences. In the Commission’s view, however, account must be taken of the mature legislation of some Member States, which generally rules out punishing legal persons.
Comparable provisions of Community law merely provide that sanctions should be imposed on legal persons, which may then be entirely in the form of administrative law, and – as has rightly been said repeatedly – that the material damage caused is then punished by financial penalties. This is also included. On the question of financial penalties, I should once again like to point out the significance of the Green Paper – which the Commission published a few months ago – on environmental liability, which ultimately aims to include the environmental damage caused."@en1
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