Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-12-13-Speech-3-366"
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"en.20001213.15.3-366"2
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"Mr President, the precautionary principle has become one of the citizen’s greatest allies in defending public health and the environment. But there is still a long way to go in perfecting this principle. First of all, it is still typically European: on the other side of the Atlantic this instrument is seen as obscurantist and even mediaeval. Yet the way the European Union itself uses it is both unclear and even irrational. Sometimes it overuses it, cheapening it, and at other times it uses it too little and provokes our indignation. That is why I regard this Commission proposal, enriched by Mrs Patrie’s report, as being so important. By establishing clearly when and how the precautionary principle should be applied, it clarifies its use at a European level, making it more credible, and it mandates the European negotiators in the next round of the World Trade Organisation to inscribe the precautionary principle as basic and universal.
But allow me to denounce what I see as a flagrant example of the lack of coherence in the use of the precautionary principle in the European Union: I am talking about mobile telephones. It is incomprehensible that the European Union should remain insensitive to the dozens of independent scientific studies that point to the possible risk posed by mobile telephones to human health. We might even ask ourselves whether this inertia does not derive from the fact that the majority of mobile phone manufacturers are European companies.
Only yesterday in Lisbon, the American professor, George Carlo, who for the last seven years has been entrusted by the Food and Drugs Administration with a study on the effect of the radiation on human health, revealed at first hand that there is the risk that the use of mobile phones might promote the appearance of brain tumours, Alzheimer’s disease and skin lesions. Under these circumstances, I invite the Commission to apply the precautionary principle to mobile phones and to draw particular attention to the dangers of their use by children."@en1
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