Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-01-31-Speech-3-199"
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"en.20010131.11.3-199"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, Commissioner, on behalf of my group, I support the analysis, conclusions and considerations presented by the rapporteur, and I also share his concern about the problems highlighted by the Multidisciplinary Group. I thank Mr Ferri for his work. In the EU there are 15 different penal codes, a large number of police forces, some of them competing with each other, and 15 legal systems, all deeply marked by their own mentality, tradition and culture. Until the EU’s criminal law systems are harmonised – something which is to be desired – judicial cooperation will continue to operate through a complex and antiquated system of requests for legal assistance, an emotive term for almost all public prosecutors and judges.
But European cooperation is more urgent than ever. For example, 77% of all cases of organised crime in Germany in 1998 had an international connection. There is a great need for the Council to act. In Luxembourg, for example, the Minister of Justice must give his personal authorisation whenever the banking sector is involved. The Netherlands use their own classification of urgency instead of adopting the urgency of the requesting State. The five countries have insufficient staff and inadequate technical and financial resources for dealing with requests for legal assistance. On the positive side, we can mention the Netherlands’ KRIS programme, the Irish system and Denmark’s experience with the Nordic countries. Where contact points exist within the Judicial Network, there is good experience and results, but the network has no influence over formal requests for legal assistance. The creation of contact points alone is still no guarantee of the qualitative leap needed in European cooperation. At some contact points, the willingness to make regular exchanges also left much to be desired.
If the Council is serious about successfully fighting cross-border crime, which simply disregards democracy and the rules of the legal economy, the recommendations of the rapporteur and the committee must be translated into action. I do not want to go over the details of what Mr Ferri has already said, but it does mean that the candidate countries need to be fully involved in the strategy for fighting organised crime at an early stage. The Judicial Network must be further expanded, for example with internet pages about the various legal systems, with videoconferencing facilities and, finally, Eurojust should become a meaningful adjunct to EUROPOL and OLAF."@en1
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